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+--- Thread: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? (/thread-5238.html)
Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Rafal - 14-01-2026
I hope I am posting it in the right forum.
We are used to think about Voynich Manuscript as something valuable, even very valuable.
Emperor Rudolph presumably paid a nice sum for it, possibly beliving it was a lost work of Roger Bacon.
Later Wilfrid Voynich himself believed he will be able to sell it for big money.
But let's take the mainstream view that VM was made in the 1400s. Now imagine some people in the 1400s can see the shiny and new Voynich Manuscript.
Would they consider it valuable? What would the think?
It wouldn't be for them any ancient artifact, antiquity or relic. They would probably realize that it is new.
And they would see bad pictures and the writing impossible to understand.
The cleverest of them would probably know that there are many writing systems in the world. Arabs have their writing, Greeks have another one, Jews yet another one and so on. And somewhere far, far away live people who have black skin, a language impossible to pronounce and possibly yet another writing.
I would say they wouldn't really so excited by unknown writing because it would be quite natural for them that there are strange things that they don't understand.
And if it seemed a work of pagan or a sorcerer, some people possibly would feel a strong desire to burn it
So would anyone be willing to pay a big money for the new VM in the 1400s?
Were there even collectors, as we understand it today, in the 1400s?
I am considering an option of VM being a fake made for selling it to a rich collector but don't I know the reality of 1400s enough to say if it is possible.
How do you think?
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - bi3mw - 14-01-2026
(14-01-2026, 07:30 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Were there even collectors, as we understand it today, in the 1400s?
These were mainly found among the upper classes. The Bibliotheca Corviniana, for example, is a world-famous book collection belonging to the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus (1443–1490). It was one of the largest and most valuable libraries of its time. Clergymen also collected books for monastery libraries within the limits of their means, in some cases over centuries (e.g., the Vatican Library and the Abbey Library of St. Gallen). Unfortunately, however, the VMS is an “ugly duckling” and not a magnificent volume, even for contemporaries. It was therefore more of a niche market item and not something for an avid book collector who valued high quality.
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Rafal - 14-01-2026
And maybe another question.
I am totally lost when it comes to the medieval prices of vellum.
I could see in several sources that it was very expensive - a manuscript cost was about one year wages of a skilled craftsman. Or something like a luxury car today.
But I am not sure about it and even on these forums I have seen doubts abour such high price of the vellum.
Do we have some consensus? Was it really that expensive or are we not sure?
Because if it was very expensive one thing doesn't make sense. You have very expensive material, yet you make very ameteurish art on it. If you have cash for vellum, then you should have it for good artists as well.
Is it yet another paradox about VM?
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - bi3mw - 14-01-2026
(14-01-2026, 09:25 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am totally lost when it comes to the medieval prices of vellum.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - RobGea - 14-01-2026
1) Would they consider it valuable?
--one man's trash is another man's treasure.
--"The value is always in the eye of the beholder. What is worthless to one person may be very important to someone else." ― Peter Ackroyd
--The Rarity Fallacy: Why Scarcity Doesn’t Always Equal Value --
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
2) Were there even collectors, as we understand it today, in the 1400s?
--Yes, book collecting has been around since at least Roman times
According to Arthur H. Minters,
the "private collecting of books was a fashion indulged in by many Romans, including Cicero and Atticus"
The Villa of the Papyri, Herculaneum. (private collection, unknown collector)
the only surviving library from the Graeco-Roman world that exists in its entirety. It contained over 1,800 papyrus scrolls.
Richard de Bury (24 January 1287 – 14 April 1345),
He was a patron of learning and one of the first English collectors of books.
Philip III (31 July 1396 – 15 June 1467), also known as Philip the Good was Duke of Burgundy from 1419 until his death in 1467.
Philip the Good brought together a collection of "about six hundred manuscripts in his possession at the height of his reign", which was the largest private collection of his day.
Jean Grolier de Servières, viscount d'Aguisy (c. 1489/90 – 22 October 1565) was Treasurer-General of France and a famous bibliophile.
John Dee (13 July 1527 – December 1608 or March 1609)
As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time.
3) Medieval price of Vellum -- definitely deserves its own thread, there are all sorts of values floating around.
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Jorge_Stolfi - 14-01-2026
(14-01-2026, 09:25 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I am totally lost when it comes to the medieval prices of vellum.
According to the post linked by @bi3mw, it would be $3-8 per folio, translated to today's cost of living.
However, the vellum of the VMS seems to be of rather poor quality -- with many holes, tears, creases, uneven edges, etc. So the Author may have paid somewhat less than that.
Quote:Would [people in the 1400s] consider it valuable? What would they think?
It is hard to say, since we do not know who the Author was and who or where he would have tried to sell to.
But here is a guess I like to entertain. For some time the Author had just a bunch of disorganized notes on paper. I don't think he consulted those notes often, or at all; he probably kept them stashed away, as records of lore from some exotic sources that he collected at some point, and were pretty useless in his present situation, but he might one day go back to.
But at some point he thought of "monetizing" those notes. For that he had to put them to vellum, in a minimally organized format; and for that he needed to hire a Scribe. He was not a rich man, so he had to do this project in installments, buying a quire or two at a time. Besides, he also had to turn the notes into a draft that the Scribe could use, and that presumably took some time too.
I am still uncertain about the order of these installments. Judging from the evolution of nymph style, I believe that Zodiac came before Bio. Cosmo may have come before Zodiac. Pharma was in that batch, but I am not sure about the order. Stars may have been there too, but Herbal was still not.
Then I imagine that the Author tried to sell the bundle as a collection of medical, herbal, and astrological lore from some distant land. Maybe saying something like "Sorry, but I can't translate this because my command of the language is very limited and there are many medical and astrological terms and plant names that I don't know and I would probably get them wrong. You will have to find someone who really speaks the language. These two sheets of paper here will tell that person how to read these letters."
But then I bet that the Author could not find any buyers, "If I cannot read it, what use would this book be to me? I cannot even use it to impress my patients. It is too thin, and does not look like a herbal. Everybody knows that a good herbal must have one page per plant, with a picture of the plant."
And so our Author decided to expand the Pharma section, and possibly other notes, into a "herbal that looked like a herbal". But he had only a few sketches or plant parts, like roots and sometimes leaves. So he had to cheat by making up all the parts that he missed (including most stems and flowers). He didn't even feel bad about it because he knew that most herbals out there had completely made up plants too. At least his plants were real, and some parts of the drawings even had a basis on reality.
Then he may or may not have found a buyer, and he may or may not have got his investment back. Anyway the book drifted around in Europe for the next 200 years, until it ended up "taking up space uselessly" on Barchius's shelf...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Rafal - 14-01-2026
Quote:But then I bet that the Author could not find any buyers, "If I cannot read it, what use would this book be to me? I cannot even use it to impress my patients.
I would agree that VM would be really hard to sell in the 1400s.
Today it is valuable because it is old and has unknown script.
In the 1400s it wasn't old and a for the script...
As I said, I believe in the 1400s people would find unknown script not exciting at all. And ChatGPT agrees with me
Simple folks would think - I can't read it but probably the wise men can.
Educated people would think - it must be some foreign script. Maybe it is this Glagolitic script or these Viking runes that I have once heard about.
I have seen a wise comment recently. People in the Middle Ages accepted uncertainty and lack of knowledge much easier than we do.
Why can birds fly? Why rivers don't run out of water? Is the Earth really round and what's on the other side of it? Who knows
If they couldn't find an answer easily then they just accepted it and moved on because they didn't know a lot of things.
So they wouldn't really be obsessive about VM like we are. Today we need to know everything and feel very bad if we don't.
And yes, you couldn't read it so it was impractical. And if it was impractical, then it was hard to be sold.
All these things make quite improbable for me that VM was made especially to be sold later to some wealthy buyer.
And I may need this "lemma" later
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Bluetoes101 - 14-01-2026
Also on the entertainment bus, I would agree with Jorge on the selling point maybe being "from far away".
But on the main question. I think so. Even though it is "poor" on the poor to excellent scale in many respects, it is still a book with 150ish(?) pages of paintings/drawings. I doubt many people would have seen many books full of paintings/drawings they could afford to purchase, never mind to the extent of the VMS. It's not a commissioned book by royalty level of workmanship for sure, but it is very grand in its amount of images. Plus we find it very wonderous even now, I can only imagine it would be then also.
While it may have been labelled as "uselessly taking up space", we should probably include the whole part,
"Now since there was in my library, uselessly taking up space, a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters, I thought it would not be out of place to send the puzzle to the Oedipus of Egypt to be solved. And so I ordered a certain old book to be transcribed in part, with the writing closely imitated (the bearer of this letter will inform you that he saw it with his own eyes). A year and a half ago I sent that writing to your Reverence. My hope was that (if your Reverence should see fit to assign some working time to investigating it and correlating those characters of unknown devising with known letters) the effort might (to the extent that the matters concealed in the book proved to be worthy of such first class work) benefit its Oedipus, and myself, and the common good.
It did not seem advisable to commit the book itself to a journey so long and full of perils. I could only suppose from the fact that I have had no word of the matter after all this time that the previous consignment did not reach Rome. I had therefore just decided to repeat the exercise when the above Father Moretus informed me to my great pleasure that it had ended up in the City. It would be an even greater pleasure if the said book could be opened by your Reverence’s aid, and make all men of quality co-owners of whatever good it contains.
From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it. In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany."To me, Barschius seems more "under the spell" of the wonder of the VMS like we, and presumably those before were. After all Marci says he (Barschius) toiled with it until his death. Can we set a date on when this level of interest would not be present in such a curious object?
[Edit: Lost half the quote from letter for some reason, pasted back in]
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - ReneZ - 15-01-2026
One thing that the Voynich MS had in its past, perhaps even from the very beginning, but no longer has now, is the promise of a great secret.
This was perhaps why Rudolf paid about 2 kg of gold ($ 250,000 in today's money) for it (assuming he did).
Not so much because it was a Roger Bacon. Bacon was just one of many 'old and wise' authors, and he had other Bacons already.
Today, hardly anyone believes that it has real secrets. It is famous because it is uncrackable, where it should not have been that difficult. Its monetary value is from its fame and uniqueness.
(This is not my opinion - I asked an actual rare book dealer at the Frankfurt book fair a couple of years ago. He was a friend of the Siloe managers and very familiar with the Voynich MS).
It is impossible to put a price on it. It is what a rich oil sheik who already owns 28(*) unique cars would give for it.
But it would be easily 5 - 10 times what Rudolf II paid for it.
---
(*) Beware: invented number.
RE: Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable? - Bluetoes101 - 15-01-2026
If that were true, its funny that this grift is still the best money maker to date.
Why would anyone sell a book that turns things into gold for any sum?
Fools and their money..