In real life, Edgar Allan Poe was a fan of ciphers and cryptography, using symbols that had come into more common use among typographers of his day.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article for Graham's Magazine in 1840 called "A Few Words on Secret Writing," offering a subscription to any reader who could send him cipher he could not crack. After six months, he claimed to have solved 100 entries and then published two additional ciphers, allegedly submitted by a Mr. W. B. Tyler, to conclude the contest. In 1985 Louis Renza of Dartmouth College proposed that Tyler was in fact Poe himself, an idea that gained further support from Shawn Rosenheim of Williams College. In 1992 Terence Whalen of the University of Illinois at Chicago solved one of them. To provide incentive for someone to crack the second, Rosenheim then established a $2,500 prize, supported by Williams College. In 1998 Jim Moore, a software designer specializing in encryption, built a Web site to promote the new contest. Rosenheim and his team of judges fielded attempted solutions for two years, but never more. In July 2000, a 27-year-old software engineer living in Toronto, Gil Broza, sent in the correct decryption. The lines were encrypted with a polyalphabetic substitution cipher using six symbols for each English letter.
This episode takes place in 1901.