I have available to me an almost complete set of books on Cryptography from the Aegean Park Press. The question is, are these books worth reading (there are a whole bunch of them) ? If only particular ones are

Yes, a lot of them are worth reading, if you want the info in them. I especially like the Callimahos & Friedman books on Military Cryptanalytics. They're the training manuals for NSA as of about the 1950s -- four volumes: Ia, Ib, IIa, and IIb, or something like that. An FOIA has picked up bits of volume III from the mid-70's, but it's not complete and hasn't been published. If you want to learn to do traffic analysis and cryptanalysis, work through the Zendian problem... and allow a season. The British Special Intelligence handbook has some great stuff on stripping off superencipherments. Also especially lovely is the Riverbank Publications series, also by Friedman. His work on the Index of Coincidence is absolutely wondrous for deciding when you've got plaintext and for finding periods of periodic ciphers. If you're looking for modern cryptology, though, Aegean doesn't have much of relevance. For that you need conference proceedings, like Crypto '93 (just out), Eurocrypt, Asiacrypt, and so on. Jim Gillogly Mersday, 20 Astron S.R. 1994, 19:41