While I was reading the German translation of “The Code Book” by Simon Singh (a very interesting book for people who want to get an overview about how encryption works), I stumbled across the section where Singh mentions a novel that was written without any appearance of an “e” (which makes the novel a lipogram). The novel he was referring to is called “La Disparition”, written by Georges Perec in 1969.

The reason for mentioning this novel in a book about codes is that one method of guessing a very early and simple monoalphabetic substitution cipher is to actually count the frequency of the distinct characters and then compare them to statistics of a “normal” plain text to get the decoded character.

But as “e” is a very common character in many languages, not using it in the plain text would eventually make this method useless.

I found another novel on the internet which is called “Gadsby”. It has about 50,000 words and also, the letter “e” does not appear in it. Wow… this is really amazing. I mean: count the words in this post and then the ones that include an “e”. How can one write 50,000 words and not use an “e”?

Respect!

• “Gadsby” - A novel by Ernest Vincent Wright:
  www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/
• “Gadsby” on en.wikipedia.org:
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_%28novel%29
• Simon Singh explains the “Monoalphabetic Cipher” on his website:
  www.simonsingh.net/The_Black_Chamber/generalsubstitutionWithMenu.html
• Interactive CD-ROM version of “The Code Book”:
  www.simonsingh.net/Shop_-_Crypto_CD-ROM.html
  
• “What is the frequency of the letters of the alphabet in English?” www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutwords/frequency
• “Letter Frequency Counter” for Windows:
  millikeys.sourceforge.net/freqanalysis.html
• “Crack the Modified Caesar Cipher with Relative Frequency Letters”:
  www.codeproject.com/csharp/crack_caesar_cipher.asp