Poe at Yucca Mountain

Large format photograph
2006

A large format photograph of a 3.5” X 5” letterpress document that uses a similar polyalphabetic substitution cipher to the one submitted by Mr. W. B. Tyler to Graham’s Magazine in 1840. In 1985 Mr. Louis Renza of Dartmouth College proposed that Mr. W. B. Tyler was in fact Mr. Edgar Allen Poe. The puzzle submitted by Mr. W. B. Tyler was solved in 2000 by Mr. Gil Broza, a Toronto software engineer.

It was early spring, warm and sultry glowed the afternoon. The very breezes seemed to share the delicious langour of universal nature, are laden the various and mingled perfumes of the rose and the –essaerne (?), the woodbine and its wildflower. They slowly wafted their fragrant offering to the open window where sat the lovers. The ardent sun shoot fell upon her blushing face and its gentle beauty was more like the creation of romance or the fair inspiration of a dream than the actual reality on earth. Tenderly her lover gazed upon her as the clusterous ringlets were edged (?) by amorous and sportive zephyrs and when he perceived (?) the rude intrusion of the sunlight he sprang to draw the curtain but softly she stayed him. “No, no, dear Charles,” she softly said, “much rather you’ld I have a little sun than no air at all.”

The document in the image combines the formal qualities and basic structure of the W. B. Tyler cipher with a series of messages from the Yucca Mountain Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a proposed site to store nuclear waste for the next 10,000 years. Since the cipher no longer remains a mystery it can now can serve a different purpose: that of a new written language.