Author & Publisher Radim Kaufmann
A growing library across psychology, history, fiction, science, and reference — written for readers who want both rigor and resonance. From the Kaufmann World Travel Factbook to the live AI-driven Voynich Manuscript decryption project, each title is the result of long observation, careful structuring, and a refusal to mistake noise for signal. Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
Coming May 2026 Featured upcoming title
A practical guide to healing, stability, and starting over. The companion volume to Why Marriages Fail — for the moment when recognition has come too late, or when the right answer turns out to be ending. Written in the same voice and from the same vantage point: not as a divorce lawyer, not as a therapist, but as someone who has watched many people walk through this passage and noticed what helped.
Across psychology, history, fiction, science, and reference. Each book is the result of long observation, careful structuring, and a refusal to mistake noise for signal. Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
New 2026 · Psychological Thriller
An American behavioral analyst in Vienna discovers his predictive model is being interfered with by a system that doesn't predict choices but makes them. A literary thriller about consent, control, and the small unobserved fractions of a life — for readers of Kazuo Ishiguro, Blake Crouch, and Ted Chiang.
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2026 · Gastronomy & Reference
A comprehensive country-by-country encyclopedia of premium cigar production, with the Kaufmann Cigar Score (KCS) rating system and 38 blind-calibrated reviews. From Cuba's Vuelta Abajo to the highlands of Cameroon.
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2026 · Historical Fiction
Historical fiction. A long view of one of the great political survivors — the diplomat who served the Bourbons, the Revolution, Napoleon, and the Restoration, and outlasted them all.
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Historical Fiction
The epic love story of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal that inspired the world's most beautiful monument.
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Travel Reference
The most comprehensive travel reference with essential facts for every country on Earth.
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Reference · World Cuisine
Authentic recipes from every corner of the globe — street food favourites, regional staples, and traditional family dishes that define cultures worldwide. The culinary companion to the Kaufmann World Travel Factbook.
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Technology & AI
A foundational reference on the architecture and ethics of large-scale generative systems — written for builders and the humans they build for.
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Business & Management
A complete practitioner's handbook covering BRD, stakeholder management, BPMN, requirements, risk management, and Agile vs Waterfall.
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Business · Practical Guide
The complete practitioner handbook — 18 chapters, 52,000+ words — covering initiation, scope, scheduling, budgeting, risk, communication, and closure. Includes all 27 free downloadable templates (T-01 to T-27) drawn from real-world industrial automation and AI project environments.
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Science & Physics
A comprehensive physics encyclopedia spanning mathematical foundations through quantum physics, cosmology, and the frontiers of modern science.
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Religion & History
One hundred ancient texts — from Genesis to the Letter of Aristeas — retold as a single unbroken narrative.
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Religion & Philosophy
A narrative tour through 2,500 years of Buddhist thought and practice — from the Buddha's first sermon at Sarnath to the modern global movement. Companion volume to The Story of Bible.
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Mathematics & Physics
A short, sharp monograph on a conjecture that touches both the Riemann hypothesis and the structure of spacetime itself.
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Mathematics · Number Theory
An exploration of stability constraints in the critical strip and their implications for understanding the distribution of prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis. "Why the critical line is not merely favored, but unavoidable."
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Art & Photography
A visual meditation on the architectural and aesthetic thresholds we cross without noticing.
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YA Mystery
When sixteen-year-old Lenna discovers a hidden room beneath her family's historic Boston brownstone, she uncovers a secret protected for generations.
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Historical Mystery · Carter Secrets II
While her daughter Lenna discovers secrets beneath their Boston home, historian Rhea Carter travels to the Ethiopian highlands pursuing a manuscript that shouldn't exist. The second volume in the Carter Secrets series.
View on AmazonUpcoming titles in preparation. Covers and Amazon listings will appear here as each manuscript moves toward release.
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Psychology · Relationships
21 hidden patterns that destroy relationships — and how to recognise them before it's too late. Not a therapist's book. A systems thinker's book. Two decades of observation distilled into a clear, actionable framework.
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Reference · Wine & Spirits · Q2 2026
A global reference to wines, wine regions, and the drinking traditions of 84 wine-producing nations — from grand crus to local distillates. A companion volume to the Kaufmann World Travel Factbook for travelers who follow the bottle.
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History · Anthropology
From Amazons to the modern woman: the untold story of power, survival, love, and civilization — and a clear-eyed companion for the men trying to understand the women around them.
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History · Civilization
A sweeping account of the one human drive that has quietly shaped empires, religions, art, and politics — from the bedroom to the battlefield, and back.
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Parenting · Practical Guide
A field guide to parenting across every age and stage — written from the same vantage point as Why Marriages Fail: not as a clinician, but as a careful observer of what actually works.
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Mythology · Astronomy
A scholarly tour through the twelve signs — separating the astronomy from the mythology, tracing the symbols back to the civilizations that first read meaning in the stars.
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Physics · Philosophy
From Einstein's relativity to the felt arrow of consciousness — an integrative essay on what time actually is, what it is not, and why physics and experience keep diverging on the answer.
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Biography · Music
A life, a message, a legacy. Roots · Rebellion · Redemption — tracing the music, the man, and the movement from Trench Town to a global symbol of resistance and reconciliation.
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Art History · Reference
A single-volume history of art across forty millennia — from the painted caves of Lascaux to the algorithmic image. Written for the curious reader, not the specialist.
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Health · Science · Q2 2026
A practical synthesis of microbiome research — how the trillions of organisms in your gut shape mood, immunity, metabolism, and longevity, and what the evidence actually says you should do about it.
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A live research project
For six centuries the Voynich Manuscript has resisted every attempt to read it. The current attempt is a coordinated team of AI agents working in parallel under human direction, against pre-registered hypotheses, with an adversarial Skeptic gate. Every entry is provisional. The manuscript remains unread — but the analysis is open, auditable, and ongoing.
Read the researchRecent releases and project updates from Kaufmann Editorial.
Upcoming · 2026
21 hidden patterns that destroy relationships — and how to recognise them before it's too late. Not a therapist's book. A systems thinker's book. 304 pages of patterns drawn from two decades of observation.
See in upcoming titlesMay 2026 · New release
The 588-page 2026 reference. 17 producing countries, 17 flagship brand profiles, 38 blind-calibrated reviews, and the complete cigar-anatomy chapter set. Featuring the KCS (Kaufmann Cigar Score) rating system.
May 2026 · The Voynich project
A continuously updated public log of an AI-driven decryption attempt. No decryption is claimed. Every hypothesis is pre-registered, adversarially tested, and every label is provisional.
Read the researchComing May 2026
From Emotional Collapse to a New Beginning. The companion volume to Why Marriages Fail. For the moment when the right answer turns out to be ending.
A short note on who is behind these books, and why they read the way they do.
Radim Kaufmann is a Project Manager and Business Analyst with over two decades of experience delivering technology and transformation projects across Europe. He currently works at Kion Group as Project Manager for Cybernetics and Robotisation, overseeing the integration of automated systems and digital transformation initiatives in industrial engineering.
His published works span multiple disciplines — from Project Management: From Initiation to Closure and Business Analysis: Blueprint for Organizational Success to the Encyclopedia of Physics: Universe in a Grain of Sand (69 chapters), the historical fiction of The Taj Mahal Letter, the psychology of Why Marriages Fail, and the AI research underlying GENOM 1.0. Each book is written from the same vantage point: a systems thinker watching the same patterns recur, and refusing to mistake noise for signal.
He lives in Prague and writes in English.
A growing photo log from research trips, library visits, and the field work behind the Kaufmann World Travel Factbook. The world is the source material; the books are the notes.
The Flavian Amphitheatre keeps winning the staring contest. In a city that produces saints and ruins in roughly equal measure, this one is older than the religion built around it — a stadium with the same brutal logic as Wembley or Yankee Stadium, retrofitted over fifteen centuries into something we mistake for sacred. The best view is from a slight rise on the Via Sacra side: enough distance to read the whole arc of the building, enough proximity to feel what eighty thousand seats actually meant in 80 CE.
Up close, the engineering does the talking. Three orders of columns stack vertically — Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, in that exact order — not as decoration but as a load-bearing argument about hierarchy in stone. The whole façade is travertine, lime-rich stone quarried near Tivoli and brought in by a road built just for the project. You realise the marvel isn't that the building is here today. It's that it ever rose at all.
Tuscan landscape is propaganda that turned out to be true. Cypress trees lining the ridge, a villa exactly where a villa should be, vines in straight lines down the slope — every cliché holds up when you arrive. The bottle on the table is a Ruffino Riserva Ducale, the Chianti Classico that helped invent the modern image of the region. I keep coming back, partly for the wine, partly to confirm that this place isn't an Instagram filter.
Venice is a city built on the proposition that water might be a road, and 1,500 years later the bet is still paying off. Riding a gondola under the Rialto with two cones of gelato — pistachio and stracciatella — is the most touristy thing one can do here, and I refuse to apologise for it. The bridge has been carrying merchants across the Grand Canal since 1591. Today it carries selfie sticks. Both seem fitting.
Oia is what happens when geology decides to assist tourism. The crescent of the Cyclades sits on the rim of a sunken volcano; the white village clings to the inside of the caldera; the blue domes started as a practical choice — cheap pigment, plenty of sun — and ended as a global brand. The view of Therasia across the water, on the right kind of late afternoon, is one of the small things in Europe genuinely worth flying for.
Assyrtiko is the local white — a volcanic grape grown in basket-shaped vines kept low against the wind, with a salt-and-flint character that tastes like the rock it came from. Sunset toasts on Santorini are roughly twenty thousand a day in summer; we did ours quietly, before the crowd assembled on the cliff for the actual show. The view did the heavy lifting.
Auracher Löchl has been pouring drinks since 1480 — about a century before Shakespeare wrote anything. The fortress on the cliff above it, Festung Kufstein, is older still, dating from 1205. The Tyrol works because the medieval logic of the place — castle on the rock, town in the gorge, river to power the mills — never stopped making sense. You sit in a courtyard restaurant under the same shadow that fell on it in 1480, and the wine list is, by some miracle, still excellent.
Paris is most itself at bicycle pace. The Seine path between the Champ-de-Mars and the Trocadéro gives you the Tower at every angle the postcards covered, plus a few they missed. The “PARIS je t’aime” sign on the basket is, of course, cheesy. So is Paris. That’s part of the deal — the city is too aware of itself to pretend otherwise, and embraces it with such elegance that you forgive it everything.
The Inca built about three hundred kilometres of mortarless stone walls across this ridge — at 2,430 metres, in a climate that swings between cloud and equatorial sun within an hour. They did it without iron tools or the wheel. The site was “rediscovered” in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, though local farmers had been living next to it the whole time. Standing here, the first thing you notice isn’t the engineering. It’s how quiet it is.
The citadel itself is laid out in two halves — agricultural terraces on one side, residential and ceremonial buildings on the other, divided by a central plaza. Whether it was a royal estate, a religious centre, or both, scholars are still arguing. What’s clear is that the people who built it understood drainage, earthquake-resistant masonry, and view planning at a level that any modern architect would recognise as serious work — and they did it five centuries before the term “civil engineer” existed in any language.
The statue is 38 metres tall, completed in 1931, art-deco soapstone over a reinforced-concrete frame. It was designed by the Brazilian engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and the French-Polish sculptor Paul Landowski, and sits at 710 metres on Corcovado, looking out over Guanabara Bay. The pose-mimicry photo is a cliché I committed to cheerfully. There’s something about being that high above Rio, with the city and the sea spread below and the wind coming off the Atlantic, that suspends the irony reflex for a few minutes.
The Grand Canyon is one of those landscapes that no photograph quite captures, because what it really has is scale, and scale doesn’t fit in a frame. Six million years of the Colorado River cutting through a kilometre and a half of sedimentary rock, exposing layers from the Cambrian up. The South Rim handles roughly five million visitors a year. The river at the bottom doesn’t notice any of them.
The two buttes are called the Mittens because they look like a pair of hands, palms inward, thumbs facing the camera. They’re the residual rock of a sandstone layer that eroded around them — the desert is what’s left after time finishes the job. The valley is a Navajo Nation tribal park; everything here, from the road in to the silverwork sold at the visitor centre, runs by Diné. It’s their land. You drive through as a guest, and behave accordingly.
The castle is 57 metres tall, designed by Herb Ryman in 1967, modelled loosely on Neuschwanstein in Bavaria with bits of Versailles and the Alcázar of Segovia mixed in. Forced perspective makes the upper turrets smaller than they appear, so the whole thing reads as taller than it is — a piece of theatrical architecture pretending to be real. I came mostly because I wanted to see how the trick worked from up close. The trick still works, even when you know it.
The acrylic in a tunnel like this is about thirty centimetres thick. Two and a half million litres of saltwater press against it from above; a few thousand fish swim through it; one large reef shark drifts past at eye level. You raise a hand reflexively. The shark, who has done this trip several thousand times before, does not react. He has things to do.
Shah Jahan built the Taj for Mumtaz Mahal between 1632 and 1653, employing twenty thousand workers and the entire white-marble output of Makrana for over a decade. He intended a matching black-marble mausoleum for himself across the river; his son Aurangzeb deposed him before that could happen, and Shah Jahan ended up buried beside her here anyway. I wrote a novel about the letter that, in my version, set the whole thing in motion. Standing in front of the actual building with that book in hand was a small private moment between the writer and the subject he had spent two years trying to understand.
The dome is faced with marble that contains trace amounts of iron — it shifts colour with the light, blue-white at noon, pink at sunrise, gold in the hour before sunset, silver under a full moon. I’d seen the photos. I’d written the chapter. Sitting on the wall opposite, in the last warm light of the day, was still the moment the place stopped being literary and started being real.
A friend from Delhi met us in Agra and brought the mangoes — Alphonsos in season, halved, dusted with chaat masala. There’s a strict scoring system for Indian mangoes; she explained the politics of it (Alphonso from Maharashtra versus Kesar from Gujarat versus Dasheri from UP) with the seriousness Europeans reserve for first-growth Bordeaux. The Taj behind us was beautiful. The mango, that afternoon, was the conversation.
What’s called “The Great Wall” is really a network of walls, built and rebuilt over twenty-three centuries — Qin, Han, Sui, Jin, and most prominently Ming. Total length, depending on how you count, is somewhere between 8,000 and 21,000 kilometres. The section at Mutianyu, north of Beijing, was restored by the Ming in the 1400s and again by the PRC in the 1980s. You can walk for hours on it. It’s still a serious hike.
Mutianyu has twenty-two watchtowers within four kilometres, more densely packed than any other restored section. They served as garrisons, signal stations, and supply nodes — the wall was a logistics system as much as a defensive line. Pointing at the chain of towers across the ridge, with a Chinese paper fan in the other hand, is exactly the kind of photo my younger self would have rolled his eyes at. Somewhere along the way I stopped being embarrassed about being where I am.
The Daibutsu is 13.35 metres of bronze cast in 1252, originally housed in a wooden temple hall that was destroyed by a tsunami in 1498 — and the Buddha has been sitting outdoors ever since. He represents Amida, the Buddha of the Pure Land. The lotus-shaped bronze lanterns to either side were added much later. Standing in front of him I thought, briefly, about how few things last 770 years. He didn’t seem worried about it.
Jørn Utzon won the design competition in 1957, expected the project to take four years, and watched it stretch to fourteen — over budget, behind schedule, and so politically toxic he resigned in 1966 and never returned to Australia. The roof shells are sections of a single virtual sphere, a geometric solution Utzon arrived at while peeling an orange. The Opera House opened in 1973 without him. He was reinstated, in absentia, as the building’s official architect in 1999. The world eventually catches up.
Bora Bora is a single volcanic peak — Mount Otemanu, 727 metres of basalt — surrounded by a coral lagoon and a shallow blue ring of barrier reef. The whole island can be circled by bicycle in three hours. The tiare flower behind a Tahitian woman’s ear is the local greeting, more reliable than a wave. The coconut water came straight from the fruit, hacked open with a machete by the man at the beach bar. He recommended drinking it before we walked. He was right.
The mosque was commissioned in the 1990s by the founding president of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who is buried in its grounds. It opened in 2007. The main courtyard is 17,000 square metres of inlaid white marble laid with floral patterns in semi-precious stones — lapis, mother-of-pearl, jasper, red agate. The whole compound holds 40,000 worshippers. Architecturally it’s a synthesis of Mughal, Moorish, and Egyptian Mamluk traditions, executed at a scale where craft tips into spectacle.
The colonnades that frame the courtyard contain 1,096 columns inlaid with floral marquetry, each capped by a gilded date-palm capital. The inlay pattern runs continuous across the whole arcade — you can walk a kilometre under these arches and never see the same flower twice. Thirty-eight contracting companies and three thousand workers built it. I found the maths of the project almost more impressive than its visual effect; the visual effect, meanwhile, was doing fine on its own.
The Western Wall is the surviving retaining wall of the platform Herod the Great built around 19 BCE to expand the Second Temple. The Dome of the Rock, gold-leafed, was completed by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik in 691 CE — the third-holiest site in Islam — built directly on top of the platform Herod made. Three traditions, all claiming the same hill. Standing in the plaza with a kippah on, you can feel the layered weight of it without committing to any one reading. Few places on Earth ask more from their visitors than this one. None ask quite the same things.
The Great Pyramid of Khufu is 4,500 years old, was the tallest building on Earth for 3,800 of those years, and we still don’t fully agree on how it was built. Two and a half million blocks, average weight two and a half tonnes, aligned to true north within a tenth of a degree, in the middle of a desert. Whatever quibbles one has about ancient labour conditions, the engineering is undeniably world-class. The pharaoh statuette in my hand cost five dollars at the gate. The pyramid behind me cost roughly the GDP of Egypt at the time. Both are valid souvenirs in their way.
The Maasai are a Nilotic pastoralist people who have shared these plains with the elephants and impalas for at least four centuries — possibly much longer. The red shuka cloth is partly tradition, partly a deliberate signal to wildlife: lions associate the colour with humans and avoid it. Our guide spoke six languages, including English, Maa, and enough French to handle the cruise-ship crowds. The elephant behind us is a bull, about thirty years old. We stayed inside the vehicle because he was paying close attention.