You snap to consciousness beneath a bright blue sky, sun blazing overhead. Not for the first time, you wonder if it might be worth staying stuck in time just for the free travel and vitamin D. You are on a concrete road, lined with all sorts of buildings in a mish-mash of styles and there’s an expansive, vacant feel to the place. You creep around for a little while before you see giant cast iron gates, above them the words Paramount Pictures in iconic swirling typeface.
While you are excited you might get to hang out with Hollywood’s infamous queer “sewing circle”, you’re a bit worried that there’s absolutely no-one around. After more wandering you hear the sound of a door closing to a building with a large “D” painted on it. You poke your head inside to see a woman staring at a piece of paper, looking concerned.
You ask if you can help, and the woman introduces herself as Edyth Eyde. She’s secretly been using quiet time in her secretarial job to start writing the first ever lesbian circular, Vice Versa, under the pen name of Lisa Ben! To make sure her boss doesn’t find out, she’s developed a way to type it up while obscuring the meaning. The only problem is that she can’t work out how to unscramble it again!
From the Lisa Ben Papers at the ONE Archives
Can you help Edyth make sense of what she’s written so she can finish the first ever edition of Vice Versa?
After a long struggle, Edyth managed to work out that the first two paragraphs say:
Have you ever stopped to enumerate the many different publications to be found on the average news stands? There are publications for a variety of races and creeds. A wide selection of fiction is available for those who like mysteries, westerns, science fiction or romantic stories. For those who prefer fact to fiction, a variety of publications on politics, world affairs, economics and sports are available. And news stands fairly groan with the weight of hobby and miscellaneous publications devoted to subjects ranging from radio, engineering, gardening, home improvements and sailing, to travel, fashions and health.
Yet there is one kind of publication which would, I am sure, have a great deal of appeal to a definite group. Such a publication has never appeared on the stands. News stands carrying the crudest kind of magazines or pictorial pamphlets appealing to the vulgar would find themselves severely censured were they to display this other type of publication. Why? Because society decrees it thus.
All the text after this is still scrambled, and the next paragraph starts with the following line:
H ncthp pr ncf VcV rs,mg znddctd tths fsw hw llnvr qtbbl tdpt rs l vstt hrl sfcn vntn.
You think you should have figured out the gist of things by the time you’ve deciphered the 4th word, and the 6th from the end.
What is the 4th word and the 6th from last word?
Additional Tools:
Listen to Nicole read a version of the puzzle out loud, if that’s easier for you!
I am usually REALLY good at word jumbles and things like that, but honestly this one was impossible without the hint! If anyone was able to solve it without the hint, kudos to you!
Same, I needed the first two hints to solve!
I am glad the hints came in handy!
Definitely needed the first hint for that one. Love it.
FYI – you can read all the issues of Vice Versa here!
Whaaat!! Thank you Sally!
perhaps i’ve been reading too many books that feature cryptography because I immediately started trying substitution ciphers with and without a single key word…without noticing one key feature of the scrambled text
I immediately went all in on substitution ciphers as well… woops!
I got the 4th word and the 6th from the end, but I’m still stuck on the 7th word from the end.
Ok, I just had to stare at it for a few minutes to remind myself and I wrote the damn thing!