signs, signs, everywhere there's signs
I started reading The DaVinci Code last night and couldn't get past the jacket cover book flaps (book cover jacket flaps? internal book jacket?). Every few lines, or so, there was a letter that seemed to have a printing error - the letters were not quite bold, but they were a slightly heavier weight. It bugged me. But then, I thought, "Maybe there's a hidden message!" (dun dun DUN!) and I realized that if there were any book that had a hidden message, it would have to be this book, the one about finding concealed patterns in DaVinci's paintings. So I jotted down the letters that bugged me. Holy sleuthing Nancy Drew, Batman! The "randomly" weighted letters created a coherent message:
Is there no help for the widows son
I'm only three chapters into the story so far, so I have no clue how that phrase might be connected to the story, but I was pretty pleased with my sleuthing skills. Has anyone heard about this hidden message?
It reminds me of my childhood (ah, to be young again) sitting at the dinner table in front of Salvadore Dali prints. We had (still have) two prints on our dinning room wall and my dinner table chair faced them. One was Persistence of Memory, the other, I can visualize, but its name I can't remember. This other painting was vertical and was of a large, abstract clock. There was something about the painting, though, that caught my eye; there seemed to be a part of the painting that looked like the letter "L". I was convinced that there must be a hidden letter in each of Dali's paintings. If you collected all his and located the hidden letters, you could rearrange them (maybe in order of their creation) and it would spell out directions to a hidden treasure. While in elementary school, I spent most of my dinners trying to find the hidden letter in Persistence of Memory. I'm still searching.
I might mention that I read a lot of Nancy Drew at that age. My first occupational ambition was to be a private detective. I even dyed my hair to try to become Nancy Drew. I turned out looking more like Bozo the Clown.
