Suspicious behavior by printer of 1700s King James Version of the Bible

Yesterday I looked at the introduction to the King James Version of the Bible that the LDS Church uses.

I was surprised to notice that the occurrence of italicized letters was kind of arbitrary, which is often the case, in my experience, when the publishers are hiding messages.

According to my big old dictionary, italicized disconnected typeface can also be labeled "cursive", which when applying the "v" step, turns into "iesruc", which is "I's are U's." So I decided to use a cipher in which I=U.

I did a doubles-cancel operation on all the italicized words in the preface: BY THE GRACE OF GOD England Sion Occidental Star Elizabeth Sun Christendom English tongue England. 

That gave me "YFZRMISLD." Applying the 26-letter alphabet ring circle where I=U, I get "EXDLQUKRZ." Applying the "z" step, I get "EXDLQUKR." Applying the "x" step, I get a dyad (i.e., two) solutions, one a taunt and the other a reference to a food/science secret:

"ER KUQLD" which appears to be calling someone with the initials "ER" a cuckold, i.e., a man whose wife is having children with a different man.

"EDL QUKR" which appears to be a reference to cooking with an "EDL" utensil or process. According to my old dictionary, the only "edel" process is an "edeleanu process" that uses sulfur dioxide, which frequently shows up in foods that I've experienced otherwise unexplainable weight loss/control from.

I dug into publishers of the King James Bible, and the cuckold taunt appears most likely to be referring to the husband (initials "RE") of Sarah Baskerville, a live-in housekeeper whose husband disappeared and who then married her employer John Baskerville, printer of the 1763 folio version of the King James Version.

[Update 9:55 pm, 12/16/2024: Here are photos of the two mentioned definitions from my old, huge dictionary:

Who knew that cursive could be nonjoining letters, too? Very interesting.]

[Update 12/28/2024: Looking at EDL QUKR, to me this looks like it could be "Edel Sugar." Spelling didn't become standardized in English for centuries, and other European languages, including German, were common sources of words used by English speakers. The German prefix "edel" = "fine" or "noble." The German word for "sugar" = "Zucker," and in some south Asian languages, the word for sugar actually starts with a K/G sound rather than a sibilant "sss." Considering how much sugar ("gula" in Bahasa Indonesian) was imported to Europe from Indonesia in the 17th and 18th centuries, it makes sense that there would not yet be uniformity in what Englishmen called "sugar." "Kucker" to me looks like a plausible way of indicating sugar in the 1700s; I speak Polish, and "cukier" = "sugar" in Polish. 

Early sugar needed refining, and the process was messier than the scientific processes now used. Refining, i.e. making "fine") sugar used to be done by adding egg whites, a very good source of sulfur! The chemical process named for Edeleanu obviously didn't get its label until around 1900, but it's interesting that it is the only chemical process that starts with "edel" in my enormous dictionary and the only notable thing about the process that the dictionary writers included is its use of sulfur dioxide.]

[Update 1/7/2025: I have realized that people who know about hiding encoded messages could easily frame others for having encoded messages when they were completely innocent and ignorant. What a mess one could make of society by exploiting that!]