The Somerton Man Rubaiyat, It's Not What It Appeared To Be...

 Prioritising Truth Over Opinion
Emphasising Evidence-Based Conclusions...

Dimensions: Height 18 cms Width 13 cms

This is a copy of a Collins version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The precise date of its publication is not known but is believed to be between the late 1930s to the mid-1940s/

It is a copy of this book that has now been identified as the one from which the torn slip of paper with the words Tamam Shud printed on it was torn.

By default, that means that the Code letters were inscribed on a page of this book which left behind the indentations that became known as the Somerton Man code page.

To substantiate this statement I set about the task of comparing the Whitcomb & Tombs version and its dimensions with the dimensions of the Somerton Man code page and then carried out the same exercise using the dimensions of the pages in the Collins version shown above.

The dimensions used are as follows:

Somerton Man Code Page 

Width= 4.50 inches or 114.3 mm    Height = 3.6 inches or 91.44 mm

A version of the code page photograph has been found in the Littlemore notes

that shows that in its original form it had the following dimensions:

Width = 117 mm or 4.61 inches   Height = 92.5 mm or 3.64 inches

Whitcomb & Tombs Rubaiyat

Outer Dustcover: Full width = 225 mm or 8.9 inches Height =  5.7 inches or 145 mm

Inner pages: Height = 133 mm or 5.2 inches   Width = 104 mm or 4.1 inches

Collins Rubaiyat

Page width = 118 mm or 4.65 inches  Page Height = 166 mm or 6.54 inches

Outer book cover Height = 180 mm 0r 7.01 inches Outer Book Width = 130 mm or 5.12 inches

The Torn Slip

The extremities of the torn slip fit within a rectangular shape that measures:

Width = 47 mm or 1.85 inches   Height = 19 mm or .75 inches

COMPARISONS

For this post, I will place the code page images on to the various pages to demonstrate the comparisons.

Collins Rubaiyat:

The next image shows an inner leaf page with the Somerton Man coe page overlaid. As you can see it is an almost exact fit, the dimensions + or - 2 mm and are as follows:
Code page: 117 mm X 92.5 mm

Book page: 118 mm X 166 mm

First here's a back leaf of the Collins book, there are in fact two such pages thus the question of how the indentations were picked up is straightforward. Later there is an image of part of a Police report that states that the 'back leaf' was missing.

The next page in the Collins book is another blank page so the indentations would appear much as the writing shown in this image.

  Whitcomb & Tombs Rubaiyat

There are several placement options for the W&T book format as below.

First the book dust cover in normal view:

In this next image, we can see how and if the code page was written on the outer of the dust cover, and how it would appear as you will immediately see, the code page does not fit onto the back of the dust cover of the Whitcomb and Tombs Rubaiyat.

The next image shows a second optional orientation and once again, the code page does not fit onto the dustcover:

While this result appears to be conclusive, we must consider one more possible explanation related to the photograph's physical size versus the actual size of the code page.  

Given what this exercise has shown thus far and the care taken that we have measurements within plus or minus 2 mm it is unlikely that the code page would have been written on the dust cover. The book within the dust cover being smaller than that cover also means that the code page will not fit again.

The Torn Slip - Whitcomb & Tombs Comparison

An image of the actual torn slip with the specified dimensions has been overlaid onto the rear of the final page of the Whitcomb and Tombs Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Fitzgerald 1st Edition, Courage & Friendship series. The overlay has been precisely positioned over the location of the words Tamam Shud. There is no wiring of any kind visible on the back of the tron slip as is the case when the overlay was shown in the Collins edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as shown earlier in this post,

Torn Slip - Collins Comparison

  

In the above image, the Tamam Shud torn slip has been precisely overlaid on to the words 'Tamam Shud found beneath Verse 75 in the Collins Version of Fitzgeralds First Edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

These next two images are of the backlit view of the area of the page containing Verse 75 in which you can see the presence of words behind the phrase 'Tamam Shud'

1. Partial overlay:

2. Precise overlay:

Here you can see the words from Verse 74 found on the back of the torn slip as described by Detective Brown in his evidence to the 1949 Somerton Man inquest,.