(12-03-2026, 09:41 AM)eggyk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It was almost certainly was less visible in person than these scans suggest, especially in candle-lit or dim lighting conditions. Surely this is a significant factor?
Of course voynich had a magnifying glass, but if you were unaware of the signature in the first place I don't think an empty part of the page would generate enough curiosity to investigate with one. I would imagine that even if you printed out a copy of these well lit images, and then viewed them in a candle-lit room at true scale, you may struggle to honestly make out the signature.
Perhaps it would be interesting to have people try it, like family members or a partner who have no pre-bias or knowledge of the signature. If one asks 10 people to describe the page under such conditions, how many of the 10 would notice the signature and mention it? How many would ignore it and focus on the mystical text above? It could be an enlightening experiment.
Well, not to beat a dead horse, or a dead Wilfrid for that matter... I don't think there is any comparison to what the average person would have done, to what an invested and eager and hungry book dealer would do. Wilfrid was quite intense about his finds, and hoped his "ugly duckling" was worth the modern equivalent of over a million dollars ($100,000 to $160,000 at the time). A literal fortune.
You put a million dollar carrot in front of anyone, and I guarantee they will peer into the very fibers of its being, using every method at their disposal, until their eyeballs fall out. Heck I once had a first edition Bell, Book and Candle, and trust me, not a speck of the smallest mark or writing went unnoticed before I put it up for sale. And that was "only" several hundreds of dollars at stake, should I have missed something on its pages.
And also, he was technically adept. One very good example is his having created for him a COLOR photograph of his "lost chart of Magellan", in 1928. That was a very rare thing to have done: "In the 1920s, color photographic printmaking in New York was a specialized field primarily serving the commercial, advertising, and publishing sectors. Unlike the automated systems of later decades, color prints at this time were often produced through labor-intensive processes like Trichrome Carbro or Photochrom"
He was state of the art. Since, when looking at the unaltered copies of the original, pre-treatment You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. name, we can clearly see the name there, I find it implausible that Wilfrid would not have noticed, then read, under bright lights (not "candles", they had very bright electric lights in the teens and twenties, of course), that name. Just like any person collecting anything... stamps, coins, paper currency, and books. And I know it was readable, I can see it now, right in front of me. All of us can. The very same thing he saw.
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So I completely disagree he would not have seen it, and also, that he would not have been able to read it. I don't buy his excuses, which to me are just another example of his feigning ignorance in order to draw out an "expert opinion", which he could then use to say, "Expert so-and-so TOLD me this is Tepenencz". He did this several times that I have seen... he was a slippery character, IMO. When he "found" the above mentioned Magellan chart, he showed it to Ravenstein, whom he then quoted in his catalog. He handed poor Newbold his "Bacon Cipher", and wink-wink nod-nod, and an offer of over $10,000 if it sold AS a Bacon... then quoted the poor man into mortal reputational embarrassment that has followed him past his grave. But he got his attribution!
And when he saw what we see here, easily, rather than report it as T-e-p-e-n-e-c, which we can all see, and he would have been able to see, too, he instead wrote to Prague, "As nearly as I can read the name it is Jacobij a Tspenecz or Topenecz, and I am enclosing [a] photograph of it.” That seems so disingenuous to me: He thought that "e" was either an "s" or an "o"? When does "s" come after "T"? It doesn't, to my knowledge, at least in a name. He didn't "guess" "e"? But still, somehow saw the "z" which probably the hardest for us to discern?
No, I believe he was, again, fishing for accreditation of what he already knew was there. Later he could then report that the Director of the National State Archives of Bohemia, Prague, Czecho Slovakia told HIM who "signed" his manuscript. You can read this letter, and related information, at my 2014 post, "You Say “Tspenencz”, I say “Topenencz”:
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But also, and this is often the case, one aspect of the name is taken out of context. That context should be seen with all the other factors going against it: It does not match a genuine Tepenencz life-signature; the numbering and therefore dating is off, the problem with the uncrossed "N", the use of the title in the way it is here, as others have pointed out, and more. So his claiming to not be able to read the name, when we have the SAME images right in front of us, and can read it... all these work alone, but more importantly, together, which only serves to amplify the case for this not being a living signature of Tepenencz, and probably being added by Wilfrid or someone else, probably to support a desired, false provenance for a (genuine or not) manuscript.
Rich
