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+--- Thread: The Book Switch Theory (/thread-5035.html)
RE: The Book Switch Theory - ReneZ - 10-03-2026
It's not that simple, but I have no problem at all to leave it at that.
RE: The Book Switch Theory - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-03-2026
Quote:The part:
Quote:Miscellanea | c.m.s.XVwas written by Jesuits in 1911/1912. The entries in this list are all short, essentially autor+titles+material+century.
It can be shown that these are summaries of the paper slips that were attached to the books by a Jesuit bibliographer, working in the Collegium Romanum.
But "c.m.s.XV" could describe any 15th century anonymous manuscript on vellum. From 20 pages to 800 pages, in-folio or in-octavo, with or without figures, in any language...
...and maybe even a book apparently written in cipher.
Quote:His identity is uncertain, but he was definitely highly knowledgeable. ... the 15th century would have been this librarian's guess.
But if that book was MS 408, what would he have based that guess on? Not the Voynichese script, of course. The month names? But isn't that script hard to date? The dresses in the Zodiac section? Would he have been an expert on that too?
Quote:All guesswork that will not lead anywhere.
But "that entry refers to MS 408" is only a guess, too...
Quote:Quote:Census 1846Was written in the right margin by Ruysschaert, sometime before 1959. It appears a bit longer in his 1959 catalogue, and refers to De Ricci's 1937 Census of manuscripts Vol.II page 1846.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. for a nearby page.
OK, so that "1846" is not a year but a page on a 1937 census of manuscripts in the US and Canada. Thus it does not provide any evidence relevant to our question.
Which brings back the question: is there any evidence whatsoever that MS 408 was ever held by the Jesuits, anywhere, anytime?
Marci's letter (which I still believe is genuine) says that he was going to send the book to Kircher, but AFAIK we don't even know whether Kircher received it, or the letter.
AFAIK Strickland and the other Jesuits involved in the sale to Wilfrid never talked about it afterwards. Is that so?
Once you commented that part of the Jesuit's book and letter holdings was shipped to the Netherlands for some time, to protect them from confiscation. Could you please elaborate on that? When was that material returned to Rome?
Thanks agan, and all the best -- stolfi
PS:
(10-03-2026, 01:10 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Ughhh. A long and detailed response lost by an unfortunate key press and no 'editor saved draft'.
I lost count of the times that happened to me. But there are two tricks that may help:
- After an accidental deletion, the CTRL-Z key does work sometimes, but you need to type it at least twice for it to work.
- If you lose a long "quick edit" because you pressed "Post" instead of "Save changes", try the "back" button on your browser. My browser (Chromium) will restore the typed text too.
- If you accidentally closed the tab while typing the message, try the "Restore closed tabs" in the browser's menu. Ditto.
RE: The Book Switch Theory - asteckley - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 12:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.PS:(10-03-2026, 01:10 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Ughhh. A long and detailed response lost by an unfortunate key press and no 'editor saved draft'.
I lost count of the times that happened to me. But there are two tricks that may help:
I usually try not to take the chance with the spontaneous deletion phenomenon, which only happens in this forum editor. In replying , I immediately cut and past the pre-populated response text into a separate editor and do all the work there. Then cut and paste it back into the MyBB forum editor.
I don't even know what mystery keys accidentally trigger, but it seems to be a flaw in the MyBB editor. It doesn't ever happen for me in any other editor. In all other respects, myBB seems to be a very good forum platform though.
(The other option I sometimes resort to is to keep submitting the unfinished response (to enact intermittent saves) and then keep hitting the edit button to continue writing. But that can cause mystery displays to other browsing users until you complete your response. There seems to be only a minor and pointless difference between "Quick Edit" and "Full Edit".)
RE: The Book Switch Theory - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 08:06 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There are some 1915 and 1918 newspaper reports where the letter is called a 'flyleaf' and some of the names in the letter are quoted.
If indeed those newspapers cite Marci, Barschius, Kircher, or Raphael, that would indeed be evidence that Voynich at least knew the contents of the letter by 1917. But anyway I already think that it is quite likely that he knew about the letter and its contents well before the 1911 sale.
Quote:There is a photo in the Beinecke libary that was taken before the chemicals were applied, in which vague traces of parts of the signature can be seen.
Do we know the date of that photo?
Quote:(10-03-2026, 02:40 AM)asteckley Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.3. Is there any other example of Hořčický's signature (post 1608 after his enoblement with the de Tepenec title) that actually matches the form found in the VMS?
Yes, one in a book preserved in the Czech National Library
That is the one labeled "Clementinum" on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., right? Indeed the VMS "signature" looks very similar to that one, and the numbering style too is the same -- the abbreviation "No" crossed twice, and no period after the number.
But if anyone went looking for Sinapius's ex-libris, that is precisely the one that would have been the easiest to find...
And strangely the signature and number style on the VMS, supposedly #19, match quite well those of that #4 at the Clementinum, but are very different from those of the two Strahov samples, #7 and #18 -- which should have been "signed" between those other two. How comes?
Quote:Stolfi will remember that we manually searched through these cards in 1999 (or 2000?) but did not find this one.
Yes, of course I remember you searching that catalog! (The Czech National Library, for those who don't know, was located in the former Clementinum building.) Which eventually led to me having to copy Jacobus's biography by hand from that Schmidl's History of Jesuits in Bohemia.
Quote:One [true signature] was found before all others, and is shown on this page:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. under "Additional Signature".
... which does not match at all the VMS "signature", or any of the "signatures" on those other ex-libris ...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The Book Switch Theory - Jorge_Stolfi - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 09:27 AM)Aga Tentakulus Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.As we know, 19 comes after 18, and book N18 is well known.Was #18 known at the time? It was in Prague, but the Strahov library is a bit harder to access than the Clementinum/NationalLibrary, and in 2009 most of its books were still not in their catalog.
Quote:Simply writing a number without knowing whether it exists elsewhere or has been recorded in a list is already Russian roulette.
As I wrote, maybe Wilfrid had obtained Jacobus's book #19 (which was indeed Hansel and Gretel story in Czech). Or he had some other reason to trust that #19 would never be found.
And maybe one of the reasons why he decided to "enhance" the signature with chemicals was precisely because one of his informers told him that he found a #18 at Strahov, oops...
All the best, --stolfi
RE: The Book Switch Theory - Aga Tentakulus - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 12:52 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Was #18 known at the time?
It doesn't matter whether you knew about N18 or not. What's important is that the numbering has the same characteristics as the others.
But if he knew about it, he should have expected that there would also be another N19. A counterfeiter would never have done this based on a mere assumption, as he has no knowledge of what else might be in the archives.
It's not a banknote where the same serial number doesn't stand out.
RE: The Book Switch Theory - proto57 - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 08:06 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a photo in the Beinecke libary that was taken before the chemicals were applied, in which vague traces of parts of the signature can be seen.
(10-03-2026, 12:38 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Do we know the date of that photo?
I do not think it was dated, unfortunately. It seems to be the only pre-chemical photo of the signature, so it would have been very helpful to know. It was only labeled (as I reported, and as I recall), "To be kept- Rotograph without autograph before it was chemically restored”.
As far as "vague traces of parts of the signature", it is actually quite better than that. Yes, my 2013 photograph, which still seems to be the only one on the internet, does give that impression. But although it is labeled "without autograph", in fact, in person, one can make out the name far better than the label, or my photograph, implies. What happened was that when I found it, I assumed it must appear somewhere else, as many others, of course, had poured through these very same boxes at the Beinecke.
So I simply used my hand held camera... no stand... with the light coming in the window, to photograph it. After I got home and discovered no one else had posted a good picture of that photograph, I intended to go back and do it myself. But you know how those things go... I still want to, though. Anyway, here is my post on the find: "New Look at the Tepenz [sic] Signature": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
As I wrote:
proto57 Wrote:However, as you will see in the full size version of my photograph of the “Rotograph”, the signature is at least partly visible. It is even more prevalent on the original, as I only shot this with a hand held camera under room and window light. In fact, almost all the letters are visible. So that begs the question, “Why?” would Wilfred apply chemicals to this?
Here is a link to the full size image: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
If you download that... your browser will restrict the size, so you need to download it... and enlarge the name area, you can see that almost all of it is readable on my hand held photo. In person, even more. But here is another crop I've just made, for the purpose of this post:
Look closely (I'm sure Voynich owned a magnifying glass!), and you will see the capital "T", two "e's", an "n", the "c" and "z" not quite as well, but they are there. And you can see the top of the "N" before the number. Far more, even in this, than "vague traces of parts of the signature". In person, identifying the name would be possible, I am sure.
The key takeaway here to me (and apparently to some on these threads), although there are many that one can derive from this photograph I think... the most important point is that the name would have been visible to Baresch, Marci, Kinner and Kircher, and yet they didn't mention it. Jorge you just wrote that, yourself. These men wanted to describe Book A as you call it, or the Baresch Manuscript, as I call it, and yet they never mention this huge clue? It makes no sense, and undermines all Carteggio provenance fatally, in my opinion. Well, lest someone now say it is "the only problem" here, no, they also didn't mention the top four or five key identifiers for the Voynich that anyone would have used, and still use, today: Naked women, tinctured baths, Zodiac, magic wheels, the Pleiades, and more.
But also, I read with great interest this entire thread, started by user Anton: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There are SO MANY important points in there, about all the instances of the name appearing (Rene adds two I had never seen). He asks important questions, and did some very insightful research. And much is learned in those posts. When you put together all these observations, the features of the different names, the actual signatures, the dating of the book the dated name appears on, and look at the work of Jan Hurych...
The clear and obvious picture that emerges, to me, is that the overwhelming evidence is that the name on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. cannot be the living signature of Sinapius/Horcicky/Tepenencz. Yet, again and again, all this wonderful work and the clear images are casually brushed aside, as "no evidence", and we are simply to accept that "scientific consensus" is that that it IS his actual signature, that "all the evidence" points to that, that any alternative opinion is "fringe".
This is not about my theory... many who believe the Voynich old and genuine also realize this, such as those now discussing the Book Switch Theory: That most likely, that name was added by SOMEONE, probably after the death of Horcicky, maybe not. Maybe the same person who, centuries ago, wrote the name in other books. Maybe someone in the 15th through 18th centuries... a librarian, a collector, a bookseller. Even, honestly, thinking he had owned it. And "other answers". But not his living signature.
This also might be relatable to the "signature" issue: In 2012, I thought to ask the NYPL if they still had the photocopies that Ethel and Anne had placed there, for the purpose of allowing chosen scholars to "see" the Voynich, without touching the actual thing. I had read about these "photocopies" in their letters, and they suggested retrieving them at some point, but I saw no acknowledgement that they had. The NYPL didn't know if they had them, because they were in no electronic catalog of theirs.... but some staffers dug around, and found this giant, dusty box (they asked me to write up a catalog description for them, which I did, and that may now be in their electronic catalog... not sure). Anyway, they let me come down and see them, but not take photos of the sheets. It looked as though the box had not been examined since WWII:
"The First Voynich Photocopies?": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
But for the purposes of this discussion, here is what I wrote about f1r:
proto57 Wrote:F1r- The chemical stains may be there, but they are faint and less apparent than on the JPG and SID. The “Signature” is moderately visible anyway. “E” at the end of “Tepence” seems to be a capital, or at least have a lower loop not presently visible. Other than that, it looks the same as we see today, if not a bit darker. Being small on this copy, and not having a means of enlarging it, it is hard to compare to what we have now.
Strings visible in binding, attached at top. Some sort of spine leather folded back.
The letter “column” down right side appears darker on the photostats than now seen.
Interesting, no? I would love to see this again, also. Perhaps they would let me take a photo of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. name again.
My guess is that this set of photocopies was made from one of those original filmstrips. Maybe someone knows when these were taken? When I took over the Voynich Net, I found in the original files, probably placed there by Gillogly, IDK, images of those original filmstrips. You can see them here:
All files I've collected there: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Filmstrips: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
And photographs of photocopies, probably from the filmstrips, and probably the very ones I saw back in 2012, at the NYPL:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. MS FACS 461/
And again, note, the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. name matches pretty closely my 2012 description, copied above. I think Pelling also found another copy of this actual filmstrip somewhere in the USA years ago... again, I've often thought that I would like to photograph some of these with a very good 1:1 macro lens at high resolution, which I could now do... perhaps there is more to be learned.
But lastly, below is an enlargement and enhancement of the photo-tag on the above linked filmstrip. I cannot resolve a date. Does anyone know the date these were taken? I think it is known, but I cannot recall. If not, perhaps an AI photo enhancement program can resolve it?
TLDR: When one sees all the images of all the materials and images of the name of Horcicky/Tepenencz, and the numbering and dates of known cases, against the backdrop of the lives of those book owners, and the dates of those books, and so on, and critically examines all of it, I in no way believe that this evidence supports, at all, the contention that the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. name is an actual living signature by Tepenencz, but was added by someone else, for some one of many possible purposes.
Rich
RE: The Book Switch Theory - asteckley - 10-03-2026
(10-03-2026, 08:06 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Yes, one in a book preserved in the Czech National Library, that was located by Andreas Sulzer in 2007 or 2008, as the scanned index card was found in a Google search. Stolfi will remember that we manually searched through these cards in 1999 (or 2000?) but did not find this one.
Rene, I'm a little confused. (Although the answer is surely before me and i'm just missing it.) Your page regarding sinapius books includes only five signatures (including the VMS one and another one that is of similar form just as I was requesting). Yet you did not suggest the one from there in response to my request -- instead you have presented a different one as an example of one that matches the VMS one in form. I'm just unclear why you didn't mention the one from your voynich.nu page at all, and why this one you just presented was omitted from that page. Is it that your voynich.nu page was intending to restrict itself to a particular set of library books? But why suggest this one instead when it is, although useful in answer to my request, obviously written by much more recent librarian and not Sinapius (aka Jakub Hořčický) himself.
I just feel like I might have missed something in the overall information about these signatures.
RE: The Book Switch Theory - ReneZ - 11-03-2026
The image I enclosed in my post here is a scan of the catalogue index card in the Clementinum library.
This catalogue card identifies the Aristotle volume that includes the ownership note of Tepenec.
The book was requested in a reading room in 2007 or 2008 but it was not allowed to take a photo of it.
This photo was requested later and shown already in the 2008 Austrian documentary.
This book is shown on my web page as nr.4.
RE: The Book Switch Theory - asteckley - 11-03-2026
(11-03-2026, 12:12 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This book is shown on my web page as nr.4.
But your "Nr. 4" in your table is the VMS itself. Just to be clear, you meant to refer to "Sequence No. 4" in your table? That is the first row in this table from your web page. (And the Nr. 4, which is Sequence No. 19, is the VMS) :
But the library card that you posted above shows a date of 1604 (which is not shown in your table). This seems to be a problem. I think Anton pointed this out in a previous thread on the topic of such problems, but I don't think there was ever an explanation proposed. Why would the book be listed with a date of 1604 when Jacobus Hořčický was not enobled with the title until 1608?
From what i understand, the library card is indicating (with the symbol immediately before the 1604), that he donated the book in 1604. The library card was presumably written considerably later and so librarian may well have referred to him by his post-1608 name with the "de Tepenecz" enoblement. So that would explain that part easy enough. But the book itself also has his post-1608 name in it and it would have had to have been written in the book prior to his donating it in 1604. (Additionally, as Anton pointed out in that other thread, the Sequence No. 4 should logically precede the later book with Sequence No. 7 which had an even earlier date of 1602 associated with it.)
How does any of this get reconciled?