The Voynich Ninja

The letter should probably be included in item 1614.1 in the Marshall library.

There's also an English biography of Lehmann-Haupt, with a reference to where his papers are now preserved, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. .

This in case there is someone in the area with some free time...

@Rene
Question: To the C14 analysis.
As far as I know 4 different sites were sampled. Do you know which pages they were, or what is even more important, was there a leaflet?
Would I still be interested to know if there was a possible deflection in the measurement. ( temporally conditioned )
I looked in on you, but I didn't find anything right away.

(05-11-2019, 11:33 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.@Rene
Question: To the C14 analysis.
As far as I know 4 different sites were sampled. Do you know which pages they were, or what is even more important, was there a leaflet?
Would I still be interested to know if there was a possible deflection in the measurement. ( temporally conditioned )
I looked in on you, but I didn't find anything right away.

You may find a rather detailed description here:
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This certainly answers the question which pages were sampled.
I am not sure what you mean with 'leaflet'.

One of the more important results was that all four measurements are consistent within the error of these measurements.

I mean a leaflet, not a normal book page.

Ich meine ein Faltblatt, keine normale Buchseite.

I see. Indeed, folio 68 is part of the multiple-folded bifolio 67+68, which is the widest single piece of parchment in the book (5 panels wide instead of the normal two).

This is quite important, because it shows that, even if the Voynich MS were a fake, the unused parchment with its varying sizes could not have been retrieved from previously unwritten pages of a book. (This is how the Spanish forger would have created this book:
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)

Thanks, Rene.
I have read it, and it is also described in detail. In fact, a sample was taken from leaflet 68. It also did not result in a rash in the test. All pages probably correspond to the same age. Also from an optical point of view, there is no difference in the parchment. ( color and structure. )
The only thing I can think of here is a fake that someone has reworked the existing book in order to get a possible higher price. ( 2nd hand ).

On the basis of your link about the Spanish counterfeiter it is nice to see how much effort is made to get the interest and also a high price.
It is not only the pictures, it is also the topic. Curriculum vitae of Caesar.
Now the VM has nothing comparable to offer.
The only attraction is the illegible text.

I'd like to dispute the statement that there are only few signs of later trimming. Instead, in my opinion, the bottom edge of the folios has been systematically trimmed. That can be seen by the fact that edges of plant roots are in many cases trimmed (this can be observed in the Herbal and Pharma sections). In certain cases this looks like intended - like in f99v, - but in the majority of cases it does not. It would have been very weird to intentionally leave out tips of roots in a consistent fashion.

When I say "systematically trimmed", I rather suspect that the whole pack was trimmed all at once, or perhaps quire-by-quire, for which the most obvious reason which comes to mind is that untrimmed folios did not fit into the intended cover.

The latter means either that trimming was done when the MS was about to be bound into its present cover, or that one of its previous covers was of the same size that its present cover.

In this light the Q3 mark on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (which folio also looks like trimmed) becomes important, because part of this mark (bottom tips of the characters) falls onto the preceding f23v. This means that the quire mark was put down after the trimming was done.

The variation in the trimmed folio height (e.g. compare You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. which both appear trimmed) suggests that trimming was done over unbound folios - either one by one or loosely stacked. When you trim something already bound (e.g. a bound quire), you won't get such variation.

In fact, the upper edge also bears indications of having been trimmed. See You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. or f38v.

I remember David once wrote a whole blog post about trimming of f116v.

So what that exceedingly special was in their cover, that they sacrificed their drawings to the dimensions of the former? Surely they could have made a cover of appropriate dimensions, could not they?