It's one thing to substitute one Roman character for another, as in the usual cryptogram. But when the new characters take the form of ancient runes, animals, aliens' heads, buildings, and elegant squiggles that could have originated with the inhabitants of Alpha Centauri, both the difficulty and the delight increase by several large jumps.

Clifford Pickover's Cryptorunes derive their content from a wildly diverse assortment of sources -- Goethe, Ibsen, John Fowles, Julian of Norwich, Bertrand Russell, Jules Verne, and Dale Carnegie, to name just a few -- for quotations and aphorisms that range from the absurd to the eerie. Pickover has not contented himself with rendering these words into ordinary cryptograms; instead, they appear in a wide range of runic alphabets. Some of these are traditional Norse runes; others are brand-new and unique, created for this book by extraordinary calligraphers and typographers.

The result is a collection of puzzles as beautiful to behold as they are difficult (but rewarding!) to solve. But there's much more to this strange and wonderful book: an excellent brief history of runic alphabets and their sources, an overview of the science of cryptology, general rules for creating and solving all kinds of codes, an insightful hypothesis concerning extraterrestrial codes, and a contest for readers. The first five people to decode a set of clues to the earthly locations of some (fictional) golden runes will win a magnificent set of handmade rune stones.