 The marginal, or even fictional, status of archaeocryptography was suggested in Zachary Mason's novel "The Lost Books of the Odyssey", which purports to be a collection of lost works which the author describes as being as old as the Odyssey and which he claims to have decoded from a manuscript he had uncovered.In the author's biography at the conclusion of the book he describes himself as "the John Shade Professor of Archaeocryptography and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford".The "lost books" were actually written by Mason and, as reviewers have noted, Mason is a novelist and computer scientist who lives in California, John Shade is a fictional poet in Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire", and no such professorship exists.