I am in the process of rethinking the posting schedule for Practical Journal Keeping.  I am gonna add more stuff.  More posts during the week and more information coming at all times.  Unfortunately all the planning for the new stuff  ate up my weekend for getting the regular stuff ready for the post today. (By the way, if the Google spiders are looking for the word “stuff” I should hit the number one spot, right?)
The tentative plan starting next week is a normal, informative journal technique or hack on Mondays, then a book or journal review on Wednesdays, and finally a link fest on Fridays (where I will spotlight some of the other great journal related sites on the web.

Now for something at least a bit informative and journal related:

The Pig Pen Cipher, Masonic Cipher, or Templars Code. A classic.

Care to guess what these people have in common?

Beatrix Potter, writer of children’s stories
Charles Wesley, founder of the Methodist church
William Byrd II, colonial writer, patriarch, planter, and leader
Leonardo Da Vinci, inventor/artist
Samuel Pepys, 17th century man-about-town

Well, yes, the easy answer is that they all kept journals.  More to the point of this post, however, they were all famous for keeping their respective journals in code.  Many of them weren’t deciphered until long years after they died.

Does this sound familiar?  “I can’t keep a journal, what if someone finds it”? So…put the juicy bits in code.

I’ve found that keeping your entire journal in code can be a bit cumbersome.  I am all about keeping your journaling as practical and useful as possible. Sometimes, however, you just can’t risk it.  It’s just as effective to encode a name or a place or (certainly) a Christmas list.

I became interested in codes and secret writing at a very early age.  At one time I had an entire journal dedicated to collecting secret writing systems.  If I found a coded message in a mystery novel I would jot the key down in the book.  I had codes from The Shadow and the Dancing Men from Sherlock Holmes.  I transcribed the fictional alphabets of Tolkien, and Krypton, and the Disney movie, Atlantis.  I copied the rune systems of the Celts, the Vikings and the Dwarves of Middle earth. I was well suited to keep any secret I needed to.

Codes need not be so very complicated.  Leonardo simply wrote backwards. A very useful code, that is easy to remember and yet will foil the casual observer might go something like this:

an ythin gyo umigh td ot ofoo lth eey ecoul dthro wof f acasua lsnoo p.

I’ll leave it up to you to decode this message.

I had my trusty book of collected codes to draw from at any time.  You don’t need one.  You can, of course, use a bit of personal creativity to hide your secrets, or, if you are like me and interested in the methods of the rest of the world, there are many websites dedicated to codes and ciphers.

The site I check out constantly is basically an online version of my old codebook.  It’s called Omniglot.com.  Omniglot.com is a fantastic collection of writing systems from around the world, throughout history and literature and even from the imaginations of people out there today.  Admittedly some of the writing systems are a bit complex (one I’ve seen recently actually has animated, spinning letters), but there are plenty that can serve as a code for your journal or at least as a jumping off point for creating your own.

Dan Eldon’s Journals

Several years ago I was browsing through a bookstore and came across something really special.  At first I didn’t really know what I was looking at.  It was a collection of photographs and doodles and maps and all sorts of ephemera randomly crammed into the book.
I was hooked and bought the book.  It was later, when the excitement cooled a bit and I took the time to actually read the introduction and the back of the book that I found what I was looking at was actually a collection of the journals of a remarkable guy.

Dan Eldon was born in London in 1970 but soon moved with his family to Nairobi, Kenya.  He started taking photos for a local newspaper at a very young age, and developed a wonderful sense of adventure.  He also, early on, began to collect both his photographs and his adventures in a series of notebooks.

These notebooks are not the standard diary entries and list of sites you might expect.  They are a collection of layer upon layer of photos, paintings, ticket stubs, doodles, cut outs, hand outs, smears, feathers, coins, invitations and all sorts of important bits and pieces from his life and travels.

Dan took his notebooks with him everywhere along with a bin full of art supplies so that he could use any downtime (when did he have downtime?) at all to update and re-work page after page of his notebooks.

Looking through his books you feel like an archeologist. You dig down through strata of entries and ephemera that seem to be in no chronological order at all.  You can piece together his experiences by finding clues throughout the books.

I really can’t do them justice in this post.  Fortunately you can get a look at them online.

Daneldon.org
Wikipedia