Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries

Cipher: Decoding My Ancestor's Scandalous Secret Diaries

Jones, Jeremy B.

Hardcover

Biographies General

Publisher Price: $28.95

ISBN10: 1958888532
ISBN13: 9781958888537
Publisher: Blair
Published: Sep 16 2025
Pages: 296
Weight: 1.12
Height: 1.18 Width: 5.91 Depth: 8.98
Language: English

In the 1800s, Appalachian farmer and rogue William Prestwood kept salacious coded diaries, leaving his descendent, Jeremy Jones, to reflect on his complicated legacy.

In 1975, a man stumbled upon a box of hand-sewn notebooks in a house set for demolition in Wadesboro, North Carolina. After thumbing through the delicate pages and finding them written in code, he passed the books to a retired NSA cryptanalyst who deciphered them, uncovering the recorded life of a white Southern farmer named William Thomas Prestwood. The diaries offered a ground-level view of a 19th-century man who passed his days recording eclipses and dissecting rabbits and calculating planetary orbits and reading Goethe and sneaking into barn lofts and closets with dozens of lovers. The reader is left, the codebreaker wrote, with the lasting impression that here in these pathetic little books is the very essence of Everyman's life from the cradle to the grave. But to author Jeremy Jones, this strange farmer was no Everyman. He was his great-great-great-great grandfather.

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Jones, Jeremy B.

View All

Also in

Biographies General

View All