The Voynich Ninja

(30-05-2022, 03:58 PM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I think comparing the VMS with the Vinland map is not useful. The Vinland Map has been analytically exposed as a forgery, 20th century titanium pigments have been used in the ink. The opposite is the case with the VMS (McCrone,2009).

Actually McCrone did find a "Titanium Compound" in at least one sample of the ink, on 70v, of the ink of a woman's face. There were several other findings that I tried to get answers to, but never got a response from them. One comment is, "Small amounts of copper and zinc are a little unusual. Sources for these elements may be as minor contaminants in the iron source, or possibly due to the use of brass inkwell; the actual source is unknown".

My question to McCrone was along the lines of "why?" was this a little unusual? For the era of the parchment, as discovered with C14? Or for finding copper and zinc "at all"? What other documents have they found them in, and from when? And I also asked if copper and zinc were found when brass pen nibs were used.

They also made this observation: They found gum binders, but then state, "None of the classical resins were found in this sample by IR spectroscopy, only the gum binding medium as was identified in all the other paints and inks... ... It could well be that an excess of gum may be overwhelming the signal of a resin".

I read the above as their being somewhat perplexed these "classical resins" could not be found, and then they tried to explain it by the signal being obscured. And also, for the gum binder, they state "Infrared spectroscopy identified the binding medium of the writing and drawing inks as a gum; see the reference spectrum for gum Arabic (Figure 1D). The spectra include several sharp peaks in the region 1100-1000cm[to -1] that are not expected for a gum as per the spectra in our library. This suggests the possibility of other constituents, which remain unidentified as of this date. Most recipes for iron gall inks include gum, usually gum Arabic, as an ingredient".

You see there that the gum didn't identify AS gum Arabic, and not any gum "in our library". There are unidentified "constituents".

Anyway, I'll leave it there, but there are many other instances in which McCrone seems to point out substances either found that are not usually found, or not found substances they expected to find. I suspect that it is a case of "once bitten, twice shy", in that they have in the past given verdicts as to the dating or origin of a document, and then found themselves in the middle of a firestorm. Think "Vineland". There are other cases, for instance, giving the inks of the forged "Oath of a Freeman" a "genuine" verdict. Whatever the reason, however, the Voynich report is very non-committal, and only reports what they have found, with minimal conclusions. It is OTHERS who have read into this report that "all is well and normal", and even that the ink is from the time of the C14 dating. No, they don't actually say that, it is others who have concluded that, after reading this report.

I urge anyone to read it again, and again, with this in mind. I think the gum binder should be identified; the "titanium compound" and the copper and zinc explained in, or out, of context; and so on and so forth. They did an excellent job, don't get me wrong.

Quote:By the way, it is relatively easy to find a sheet of parchment from this period to make a fake. To assemble blank sheets in the quantity of a manuscript from the same period is, well, let's say, a rather difficult challenge. Not to mention other issues ( binding, wormholes, ink etc.).

Voynich purchased the Libreria Franceshini in 1908. It had a reported half a million items of all types and conditions in it. I don't think it is all that hard to accept that enough material for "a Voynich" was not in those piles, somewhere. The collection of stuff went back 40 years earlier, by the owner Franceshini. When he died, his son was selling off stuff as scrap... fish wrapping and such. It sat for a couple of years before Voynich bought it. That being said, even up until the early 2000's, quantities of unused vellum were available. And also, I don't think that 200+ pages were found, anyway... the Voynich is quarto. If you calculate the area, only something like 3 quires of full folio size vellum would be needed, and cut down. This would also explain the (also determined) "unusual for the time" foldouts: These fit quire size folios: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I have to interject in my own part of this discussion, here, to avoid being misunderstood: I don't point these things out to convince people as much as to make the point that most of what people accept as factual and settled about the Voynich, is anything but that. There are many questions still to be asked and answered, that have been neither. And then, of course, one is welcome to come to different conclusions than I have... there may be other reasons for the many anomalies I bring up. But I hope these points are appreciated in the light it is offered: So that everyone has a full understanding of everything they believe true.

Rich.

The Libreria purchase: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Hi René: Thank you for your feedback here...

(31-05-2022, 05:17 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Before his 1912 major deal with the Jesuits, Voynich was not a big-time dealer. Had he had access to a stock of genuine old parchment, he would have been able immediately to make some good money by selling it in this form.

As I pointed out earlier in this thread, Wilfrid purchased the Libreria Franceshini in 1908, and it was said to have over half a million items of all types... paper and vellum, books, ledgers, broadsheets, newspapers. Apparently the bulk of these items were not all that valuable, although there were reportedly many treasures in there, too. But the son was selling much of it as scrap after he inherited the place, before Voynich bought it.

Also, even in modern times, ancient blank vellum has not been overly valuable. In one case, only a decade or so ago, many blank sheets of 16th century blank vellum... but lined, in prep for writing... was selling for only $20 a sheet. In Voynich's day I think it would have been very inexpensive... and see below:

Quote:What few people know is that he actually did this with genuine old paper. He sold sheets of these to a Scottish artist whose name escapes me. This is reported by Millicent Sowerby, who worked with Voynich from 1912 - 1914.

That would be the famous etching artist James McBey. I have the autobiography "The Early Life of James McBey", and his account of purchasing the blank pages from Wilfrid lines up with Sowerby's. I think he sold them for only a shilling a piece.

He also relates scouring the street markets for old materials, for use in his work. He wanted the real old stuff. In one case he found what he believed to be a personal sketchbook of Rubins, in a flea market. But what most interested me is that he collected a huge number of paper samples, and kept notes of their origins. After he died, his widow (a famous and talented book binder, in fact) sold his collection of paper. This was bound into one or more books by the buyer, and I tracked down the library it is in. The point being I wondered if it would be of interest to anyone to see those papers that actually were bought by Voynich, if the provenance was in the notes. I don't know. It is just one of those many trails you can get lost on, probably...

Rich.

(31-05-2022, 12:16 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(30-05-2022, 09:55 PM)kckluge Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Lisa, assuming that you are privy to details of the McCrone analysis beyond the summary made public, are you able to comment on:



* Barbara Bennett's claim in _Fortean Times_ that "...McCrone Associates tested the ink and determined...that it had been applied to 'fresh' vellum: i.e. before a patina had built up, meaning within months of the vellum being made if not mere weeks afterwards..." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)



* Rich's reading of the public report as implying that the the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. marginalia sampled was contemporary with the main text and drawing ("...Barabe also concluded that certain quire and page numbers were different than the main text inks, telling us that if the f166v (sic) ink were different, we would have been so informed. In effect, the conclusion tells us that the marginalia was applied 'contemporaneously' with the main text ink!....the ink of the main text and the 'pox leber' marginalia are the same, according to the well-respected scholarship of McCrone." -- You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.).



Hopefully NDAs regarding further details don't prevent clarification on these points.

I don't have access to anything that isn't already public - I'm not affiliated with Yale at the moment, so I wouldn't have access to anything confidential. But I'm not sure what your point is in citing these observations. There's nothing unusual about parchment being used soon after its creation...what do you think that observation implies? And as for 116v, there are other inscriptions in the manuscript that appear to be roughly contemporaneous with the C14 dating: not only 116v, but the months on the zodiac pages and the inscription on f. 17r. None of this seems suspicious to me.

Again, not asking you (or anyone else associated with the testing) to speak out of turn regarding info that contractually shouldn't be disclosed.

With regard to Bennett's claim: "There's nothing unusual about parchment being used soon after its creation...what do you think that observation implies?" -- I think it would imply (if true) that the manuscript unambiguously can't possibly be a 20th (or 19th or 18th or 17th or 16th) century forgery using 15th century vellum in the form of evidence that can't be wished away by appealing to a sufficiently clever forger, as Rich has done with all the points you raised earlier in the thread.

With regard to Rich's interpretation of the report with respect to the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. "pox leber" marginalia: His blog post that I linked to explains why *he* thinks that would be problematic; I was mere hoping for a more informed opinion regarding whether he was reading more into the limited information in the summary report than was actually there.

The long annexes to the published report only include photographs of the sampled areas and numerous graphs, typically spectra. There is no additional text, and the text of the published report gives a full summary.

Why would Titanium be suspicious?
It is only Titanium anatase which would be anachronistic, and this was found in the Vinland map, not in the Voynich MS. Rich knows this well.

(31-05-2022, 07:46 PM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Why would Titanium be suspicious?
It is only Titanium anatase which would be anachronistic, and this was found in the Vinland map, not in the Voynich MS. Rich knows this well.

Thanks Rene, this question has actually been on my mind. I thought titanium per se would be a problem.

Edit: I had completely forgotten about You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. eMail from Raymond Clemens.

Hi:

Rene wrote, "Why would Titanium be suspicious?
It is only Titanium anatase which would be anachronistic, and this was found in the Vinland map, not in the Voynich MS. Rich knows this well."

This actually doesn't settle the matter, only part of it, and there are still unanswered questions (which I will list below). Of course I do know the issues surrounding the form of anatase found in the Vinland map, but to be clear the term "anatase" is often used to ONLY denote the form found there, which is a post 1912 processed type, while it actually does include natural types of Titanium Dioxide:

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But I know what you mean, as I also thought, for some time, "anatase" was only the man made processed version of Titanium Dioxide, and that is what we are referring to with the Vinland map.

The issue with the anatase found in the Vinland Map... I know you know this, Rene, but for anyone who has not delved into the specifics of this... is not that it IS anatase (which is Titanium Dioxide) but that McCrone Associates determined, in 1972, that it is found there in a form which shows it has been subjected to a process which smooths or rounds its natural crystalline form. The only known process for this was patented in 1912, and not actually sold to the public, in inks and paints, until a few years later. The 1974 McCrone report gives 1920 as the first commercial use (and Kirsten Seaver uses this date, see below), but I've found it was used as early as 1917.

Even so, the form of the Titanium, and the quantity present, and how it got there, is all still very controversial.

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As Kirsten Seaver wrote to me regarding this issue, "There were pre-1920 patents for industrially modified anatase in both Norway and the US, but the fact is that it was only after ca. 1920 that the process was stable enough to be applied to the production of paints and inks, and it took several more years before the general public in Europe and the US had easy access to ready-made paints and inks."

And here is an excellent page outlining the problems with this post-1920 form of Titanium Dioxide, what it looks like, and why it matters: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
 
So that is the issue specific to the processed form of anatase, its modernity. But in raising this concern I was not ignoring the distinction between a processed and natural form of Titanium, but raising several questions:

1) While the type of Titanium found in the Vinland map betrays its modernity, the presence of it, especially in the quantity used, was in and of itself unusual. That is, the form placed it 1920 or later, but the presence of Titanium in older documents is still an issue. Trace amounts, maybe not so much.

"Until recently it was thought that ink used before the sixteenth century did not contain titanium. However, a new type of analysis detected titanium in the ink of the famous Bible printed by Johannes Gutenberg and in that of another fifteenth-century Bible known as B-36, though not in the ink of any of numerous other fifteenth-century books analyzed. This finding is of great significance, since it not only strongly supports the hypothesis that B-36 was printed by Gutenberg but also shows that the presence of titanium in the ink of the purportedly fifteenth century Vinland Map can no longer be regarded as a reason for doubting the map's authenticity."

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You see, the presence of Titanium is rare enough to help identify this B-36 bible AS a Gutenberg product. So the question relating to the Voynich McCrone finds of Titanium in the inks of samples 20A-1-20F and 17A-17F are to me something at least interesting: How much, and why is it there? What explains it, since for 1420 it is apparently rare to find?

2) It is only an assumption that the Titanium found in the Voynich is NOT the modern, anatase form. Yes we might assume that if they examined it, and found it to be modern anatase, they would have noted this. But we don't know IF they examined the crystals for the form, as the report actually does not even mention the Titanium, other than listing it as a find, in the charts at the end. But more importantly, the  report does not mention the high magnification tests which would be necessary in order to determine which crystaline form the Titanium is. When listing the tests, the maximum magnification described is a 2.5x eyepiece. As can be seen in my link: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , they clearly show that an electron microscope was needed, and used, at powers of AT LEAST 25,000x were used, and up to 170,000x. Basically, McCrone only tells us they found it, presumably with their Spectroscopy, but not the quantity, nor the form, nor any explanation for its presence.

I also find it interesting that McCrone does NOT explain the Titanium, because on several other substances found, including the "unusual copper and zinc", they do make an effort to explain them. This leaves one with the opportunity to claim their not mentioning it means it is normal to find it, but this, too, would be incorrect, as they also explain several substances which are normal to find. In fact, almost all of both situations are explained in the main text... but not the Titanium. They just tell us they found it.

It is, to me, not nearly the end of this issue, because these and the other questions I've listed remain unanswered. To repeat and elaborate, the questions would be:

1) "Titanium Compound": How much was found? What form is it? Was it examined under the high powers of an electron microscope, as was done with the Vinland ink anatase Titanium?

2) "Unusual Copper and Zinc": Why "unusual"? For the era of the calfskin, or globally, for all manuscripts? Brass inkwells are suggested as a source, but does McCrone, do we, know that brass inkwells do impart copper and zinc to the ink? Can copper and zink appear in ink (rhymes! I could rap this...) when a modern brass pen nib is used?

3) Even McCrone admits they could not identify one of the gum binders, and found it did not match any in their "library", "The spectra include several sharp peaks in the region 1100-1000 cm-1 that are not expected for a gum as per the spectra in our library. This suggests the possibility of other constituents, which remain unidentified as of this date. Most recipes for iron gall inks include gum, usually gum Arabic, as an ingredient". But this is NOT Gum Arabic, they don't know what it is, so this is an important question to me. And what are the "other constituents"

4) Mercury is apparently a mystery: "Samples 9 and 17 also contained small amounts of mercury, but the other constituents are similar to the rest of the writing and drawing inks. PLM examination of the sample did not show the presence of vermillion (mercury sulfide), a common red pigment, so its origin remains unknown".

Anyway, the point to all this is that I cannot, nor can anyone else, make claims about what this all means. There are certainly enough implied and stated anomalies for me to object to the claim that "McCrone tested the ink, and found nothing out of the normal for a 15th century ink". And yet, this claim is stated as fact, in blogs, articles, and in documentaries. But McCrone says nothing about the age of the ink, nor even do they say it is normal for the 15th century. And at the same time, they point out anomalies in the ink, and unidentified substances.

So do these issues imply modern forgery? I don't know, they need to be answered, and perhaps the answers will show the ink to be proper for the 15th century after all. We don't know that yet. Which is my only point here, and always has been... it is not settled, until these questions are answered.