Monday, January 18 & Saturday, January 19

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About this site:
In 1993, I spent the year writing in a blank datebook from 1954. Now, in 2010, I'm posting each page on the web and writing about it. You may want to start at the beginning.

1954: January 18-19

Monday
Wow, I'm deep.


Tuesday
Happy birthday, Christian!

RQ -- short for Religious Quest in Literature -- is the AP English lit and comp class at Barrington High School. When I was there, it was taught by Mr. Griffith, who was one of my classmate's father and the head of the English department. (It's still being taught, apparently.) It was considered one of the most challenging classes taught at BHS, but it was also definitely one of the most rewarding.

I may come back and fill more details in about RQ later, but for now I want to draw your attention to the bottom left corner of the page. What's partly hiding under that crosshatching is the first draft and key to an "alternative alphabet" (or, as I understand now, really more of a crypto font) that I developed for use in 1954. See, it only took me three weeks to realize that if I was going to write my personal thoughts and dreams in what was meant to be a public journal, I was going to have to figure out a way to make them more private. So, I developed this coded type to "hide" my thoughts in plain site.

Some of the letters are pretty obvious, but others were quite hard to identify -- and combined with the coded punctuation as well (including the spaces between words), only a couple people ever figured out how to read it. See if you can figure it out later this week, when it makes its first appearance in use.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Andrew Huff published on January 18, 2010 12:46 AM.

Saturday, January 16 & Sunday, January 17 was the previous entry in this blog.

Wednesday, January 20 & Thursday, January 21 is the next entry in this blog.

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