Back cover illustration by Henry Holiday to Lewis Carroll’s tragicomical poem The Hunting of the Snark (1876) with a detail rendered in four variations:
(1) original,
(2) vertically flipped,
(3) horizontally flipped,
(4) rotated by 180°.
I don’t know whether these patterns are letters. If so, they could be asemic. If not, could they be read as e.g. “Anne I”? Who knows? But the pattern in that detail is distinctively different from its surrounding.
93% of the black areas in the image are connected to each other and can be recolored (here I used red) with one click. The “letters” are not part of that cluster.
I also think that Henry Holiday (who engraved the front and back cover illustrations of The Hunting of the Snark himself) may have hidden some “skulls” in the waves.
The black thing besides the “letters” looks like an axe, e.g. for chopping off heads.
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More about the back cover illustration: When the queen met the Boojum:
2017-09-08, update: 2024-09-07