the swamps of an undiscovered continent. Between 1917 and 1920, George Fabyan used Riverbank’s vanity press to publish eight pamphlets that described new kinds of codebreaking strategies. These were little books with unassuming titles on plain white covers. Today they are considered to be the foundation stones of the modern science of cryptology. Known as the Riverbank Publications, they “rise up like a landmark in the history of cryptology,” writes the historian David Kahn. “Nearly all of them broke new ground, and mastery of the information they first set forth is still regarded as the
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