Original 1886 version of Boudet's map comes to light confirming the presence of the inch-grid

A photograph of the map included in the original 1886 edition of Henri Boudet's La Vraie Langue Celtique has been located online, as reported in a recent blog post at the Rhedesium website. No link to the original page is provided, but it is said to appear on a Cambridge University Library catalogue. It is clearly genuine. Importantly, it includes a reference measure, which now makes it possible to tie up a loose end in The Map and the Manuscript, and in doing so, happily provides full confirmation of the theory outlined there.

Before we discuss this "new" photograph of the 1886 map, a quick recap and overview of the topic. Boudet's 1886 map is reproduced in two separate facsimile editions of his book published in 1978 by the publishing houses of Belfond and Bélisane. In The Map and the Manuscript, I revealed the existence of a concealed grid of inches underlying the layout of the map, defined by the dimensions and placement of the first word of the prominent title, namely Rennes. Specifically, in the two 1978 editions, the word is precisely two inches in length and one half inch in height. A grid of half-inch squares is generated across the map by taking the block of text of Rennes as a reference. The full details may be found in my book.

By the time of publication however, I had not managed to locate a copy of the original 1886 version to confirm that indeed the two 1978 maps were facsimile reprints at the same scale. There were good reasons to suppose that the original would be identical in scale, but until I had the opportunity to either measure for myself an original 1886 edition of the map, or, just as good, to find a photograph of the original with a measuring rule included for scale, the final proof of my hypotheses would have to wait.

Now, the wait is over. Here is the photograph.

Notice that the measure in the top right hand corner, by a welcome and slightly uncanny twist, displays a length of two inches on the upper bar, and on the lower bar, five centimeters.

This enables us to determine the dimensions of the map overall, which we will do in a moment.

But it is even simpler to directly check whether or not this 1886 map has the same dimensions as the 1978 editions: all we need to do is check that the measure of two inches matches the length of the word Rennes.

Here it is. In the image below, I have simple created a copy of the photograph, of identical size, reduced the opacity to 50%, and then moved it to align the measure with the word Rennes.

It is exactly two inches in length.

The maps in the two 1978 editions are the same scale as the 1886 map. The scale has not been altered. They are indeed facsimile reprints, as far as scale goes.

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Now it is possible to recreate the steps as they happened.

The Belfond 1978 version, with the Plantard introduction and other materials, was a facsimile of the original 1886 edition map, with two changes.

First, it was reproduced in black and white, rather than in colour the original.

Second, the Belfond edition cropped out some of the white space which appears on the 1886 edition, and added a black border around the cropped area.

As described in my book, the left hand side of this border aligns immaculately with one of the vertical lines on the grid of half-inches.

Indeed, this acts as the first confirmation that the concealed grid is present.

It is now apparent that the border was added to make the grid slightly easier to find, or at least, for confirmation to be more readily provided when it was eventually found. As it now has.

For completeness, we can now supply the correct dimensions of both the 1886 and 1978 Belfond map.

The 1886 map is printed on a piece of paper which measures 219mm width by 316mm height.

The 1978 Belfond map is printed on a piece of paper that is 190mm x 218mm. The black border just inside the edge of the paper measures 181mm x 285mm.

These measurements were made by myself using my copy of the 1978 Belfond edition. Photo below shows the 1978 map with a ruler. Map is not completely flat so shows lightly less than 285mm from top to bottom border.

So let's now reproduce an image from The Map and the Manuscript, showing the half-inch grid ruled on the 1978 Belfond edition map, now in the full knowledge and with complete comfirmation that the same grid at the same scale based on the same measure is present in the 1886 original.

If we turn now to the other 1978 edition, from Bélisane, with the deSède introduction: in this case, the map has been reproduced in colour. Again, it is the same scale as the 1886 and 1978 versions, with the very slight difference that it appears to have been either stretched in the vertical (or height) dimension, or the title moved slightly away from the map itself. Either way, the difference is very small, amounting to a few millimetres over the full vertical dimension. As I think about it now, the copy I have is not actually the 1978 Bélisane edition, but a reprint of it published in the 1990s. So we are getting further away from the original, and at some point, for some reason, a slight distortion has occurred in the height.

One interesting observation is that the distance between the two "registration" marks at the top and bottom of the 1978 Bélisane edition map is very close to 316mm, the height of the full piece of paper on which the 1886 map is printed. This suggests that the registration marks were an artefact placed either side of the ends of the 1886 map from which they were taking the facsimile.

In any case, it is the 1978 Belfond/Plantard edition used throughout The Map and the Manuscript, and this version is now fully confirmed as being identical in scale to the 1886 Boudet original.

Now we can state confidently: the inch grid is a real artefact. It is found in the landscape, in the 1886 original of Boudet's map, and in the 1978 Belfond facsimile.

Of course, it was to be expected that the 1886 map would be identical in scale to the two 1978 versions. It would have been unusual if two separate publishing houses had set out to make facsimile reproductions of the map, and had both decided to change the scale, by exactly the same amount. Moreover, the scale of the two 1978 versions is exactly 1:25,000, making it even less likely that this final scale is the result of a random identical pair of scale changes.

In addition, Boudet himself leave several blatant clues to the use of the inch measure as the key; in particular, the form of his bespoke lettering, imitating uncial script, denotes inch high, or half-inch high lettering.

Finally, the measure of the inch and the scale of 1:25,000 are inherent in the designs in the landscape geometry itself, as I have demonstrated at length in The Map and the Manuscript. Now we can say confidently that awareness of this knowledge runs through Boudet's 1886 map, and through the 1978 versions also.

This is not to say that the various parties had complete knowledge of the system by any means. In fact, certainly they did not. The landscape meridians themselves were not known to Boudet, Plantard or any of the others because they were only discovered in the 1990s. And at the end of the day, it is the landscape meridians which validate the grid because the concealed inch grid in the Boudet map aligns seamlessly with three of these meridians. Alll of the details for those interested may be found in The Map and the Manuscript.

In closing, I extend my sincere thanks again, and credit, to the researcher at Rhedesium who located the photograph of the original 1886 map. With this loose end now tied up, there remains no barrier to the full acceptance of the solution I have proposed in The Map and the Manuscript to the excellent puzzle of Boudet's map: it it based on a concealed grid of half-inches, aligned to the title, Rennes Celtique.

The Map and the Manuscript: Journeys in the Mysteries of the Two Rennes

Available in Kindle, paperback, hardback and now ePub.

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