New Gorhambury·Baconian Ciphers

One-Day Report · Word Cipher · September 5, 2026

Today's claim

The photograph everyone has been citing is a thumbnail. The full-size one is twenty-three times larger, and it shows a red pencil line drawn around six lines of Shakespeare — which is exactly the operation Owen said his method consisted of, performed on the object.

findings may be superseded by later reports

The short version

In the 1890s a Detroit physician named Orville Ward Owen claimed that Francis Bacon had hidden a long prose narrative inside the printed works of Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and others — recoverable by collecting every sentence containing certain guide words and reassembling them. To do it he built a machine: two spools in a wooden frame, and between them a thousand feet of canvas with roughly a thousand printed pages pasted to it, so he could wind the whole English Renaissance past his eye and mark it in coloured pencil.

The canvas still exists, in storage in Gardiner, Montana. The frame and the second spool do not. And for the last nine years everyone writing about it — this project included — has been looking at a 300-pixel thumbnail.

Today's result in one sentence. The Francis Bacon Society's full-size photograph is twenty-three times larger, and it shows something nobody has published: a red pencil line drawn around six lines of Shakespeare — which is precisely the operation Owen said his method consisted of, performed on the object.
The Owen cipher canvas at full resolution with its marks measured
drag sideways on a phone · tap or click for full size
The canvas at 1431 × 1073. Boxes mark the largest mark of each colour, found by measurement rather than chosen by eye; the green boxes are Owen's own handwriting. Below, three details cut from the frame at 5× and 7×.

Questions

What is the Word Cipher?

A claimed method, not a code in the ordinary sense. Owen's account is that certain common words — fortune, honour, nature, pan and a handful of others — were planted as signposts, and that the sentences containing them, gathered from across many books and sorted into piles by a shared key word, assemble into a continuous secret narrative.

The procedure he describes is physical and mundane. His own words: "pencil around every sentence containing the guide word being used, thus enclosing the keys as well." Then head each sheet with its key word, sort the sheets into piles, and join like to like.

So what changed today?

The photograph everybody cites is a WordPress thumbnail — the small copy a website generates automatically from a larger upload. Stripping the size suffix from its address produced the original: 1431 × 1073 instead of 300 × 225, twenty-three times the pixels.

At that size the canvas becomes readable. Three things came out of it.

The marks are enclosures. Detail A is a red pencil line drawn around six lines of Petruchio's speech in The Taming of the Shrew — down the left, across the top, round a rounded corner, back along the bottom. A closed loop around a passage. That is Owen's instruction, executed. Yesterday this report said the question could not be answered at the available resolution. It can now, and the answer is enclosure.

Three colours, not six. Red, yellow and blue separate cleanly. Green does not appear at any threshold. An exhibit sheet prepared here in August said "roughly six colors"; that stays withdrawn, and the corrected figure is three.

Owen's own handwriting is legible. Every pasted page carries a three-digit number in its top margin — 664 and 667 in blue crayon, another in red — and they do not follow the printed page numbers, which run 54, 53, 52 across this frame. What they are is unknown. There are about a thousand of them on the canvas and nobody has ever read one.

And the lines you said were creases?

Still creases. But the argument this report gave yesterday was wrong, and that matters more than the conclusion.

Yesterday's reasoning was: the dominant diagonals carry no colour, therefore they are not pencil. Graphite is grey. A plain pencil line would have passed that test unchallenged. The colour measurement could never have separated a crease from a graphite mark, and saying it did was an error.

What settles it is the full-resolution shape. Detail C shows one: soft-edged, gently curving, with a light side and a dark side, running across pasted-page joins and over bare canvas without deflecting. That is drape in a hanging textile. The yellow stroke beside it is not — it is sharp, opaque and stops at the edge of the page.

Right answer, bad reasoning, corrected here rather than left to be found.

What can you now read on the canvas?

The running heads and page numbers. The lower band of this section runs, left to right: page 54 of Romeo and Juliet, then page 53 with its head-title, then page 52, the last page of Titus Andronicus. The printed pagination descends left to right. Above it is a band of The Taming of the Shrew.

So the canvas carries parallel bands of different stretches of the book, and in this photograph's orientation the pages run against the direction of the text. Owen's own numbers run the other way again.

Does any of this show the cipher is real?

No. It shows that Owen did what he said he did with a pencil. It says nothing about whether the sentences he enclosed contain a message.

Two things would have to follow, and neither is established. First, that the guide words are unusually placed rather than falling where common words fall. Second, that the reassembly is determined rather than chosen — that a second person, given the same key word, produces the same text. There is one report of exactly that test being passed, in 1893, and it is discussed below; it is the best evidence in the file and it is still one man's account of one afternoon.

Is there an eyewitness?

One, and he is unusually good.

Josiah Byram Millett — Harvard graduate, founder of a Boston publishing house — went to Detroit in February 1893 and asked Owen to show him. Owen handed him a key word, Story of the Spanish Armada, showed him the procedure, and left him to it. Millett copied about a hundred lines from various parts of the wheel himself and assembled them, adding no words of his own. Owen had independently written out his own version beforehand. The two were compared and, in Millett's account, corresponded almost exactly.

He went back twice more. In December 1895 he was let into the workshop and spent several hours alone with some two thousand sheets of extracts, satisfying himself they contained passages from the Iliad — a judgment he was equipped to make.

Against it: he was a sympathiser, the conditions were unrecorded, and a method with enough latitude can be taught to produce the expected answer. And the exact issue and date of the article carrying these accounts is still not pinned down, which is stated here rather than glossed.

What would a proper scan settle?

How many colours Owen really used and whether they mean anything. Whether every mark is an enclosure or only some. Which passages he selected, from which editions, in what order — the whole of the method's evidence. And the thousand numbers in his own hand.

This photograph covers roughly eight pasted pages of about a thousand. A rig for the rest exists on paper: a gantry that carries the camera over the canvas rather than moving the canvas, a flattening platen that applies only its own weight, and a lighting spec written for faded pencil on aged fabric. It has never been built, because until today there was nothing to point it at.

The condition is the pressing fact. The glue is drying and pages are crumbling. The canvas can be unwound gently once. Not twice.

What would change your mind?

Stated in advance, as every issue of this series does:

  • If a scan shows most marks are underlines rather than enclosures, Owen's description of his own procedure is inaccurate and every reconstruction built on it has to be rebuilt.
  • If the guide-word sites turn out no denser at his cited passages than anywhere else in the text, the method is finding what any method would find.
  • If the three-digit numbers turn out to be a librarian's or a later owner's, they carry nothing.

The second is testable today without the canvas, and it is next.

Who is doing this and why?

Walter Wilkinson, Worland, Wyoming. This is the sister strand to the Biliteral Cipher work published alongside it.

The reason it has merit is that the artefact is decaying in storage, no one has measured it, and the one photograph everybody cites turned out to be a thumbnail of a better one that was sitting at a public address the whole time.

The wider project lives at New Gorhambury. Worth knowing before you read it: those pages argue a conclusion. These reports deliberately do not.