In my current break between drafts, I'm reading The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers, a novel that I've been intending to read since I was sixteen years old. It's essentially the work of fiction that Doug Hofstadter might have written in his Metamagical Themas days, if he were a little less dilettantish and a lot more literary. I have mixed feelings about it so far (it's very cute, overripe, and excessively amused by its own cleverness and wordplay, much like Hofstadter), and I've also been slightly sidetracked by its dedication, which reads as follows:

RLS CMW DJP RFP J?O CEP JJN PRG
ZTS MCJ JEH BLM CRR PLC JCM MEP
JNH JDM RBS J?H BJP PJP SCB TLC
KES REP RCP DTH I?H CRB JSB SDG

According to a rather old quote from Powers, the dedication remains undeciphered. I was going to ask some of the cryptographers on this blog to have a crack at it, but I have a hunch that this "code" isn't precisely what it seems. For one thing, there are exactly thirty-two triplets, which seems a bit too neat in a book obsessed with Glenn Gould, and the big tipoff is at the very end. Look closely at the last two triplets (or search for them on Google). Clever, huh?