Cost to produce the Voynich manuscript

[bi3mw]

I was wondering if anyone could point me to a source on the price of vellum in late medieval Central Europe? I

Here are some estimated prices and their conversion to today's purchasing power:
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[Jorge_Stolfi]

The ink and pigments could all have been made quite inexpensively with easily-acquired ingredients. There's no gold, no minerals like malachite or lapis.

According to McCrone's spectra, the blue paint is the mineral azurite Cu3(CO3)2(OH)2.  It is more scarce than the   chemically similar green malachite Cu2CO3(OH)2.  They are You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in massive solid form, but neither should be particularly expensive as a pigment.  Nothing like ultramarine pigment (lapislazuli) that was very rare and imported from Afghanistan.

All the best, --stolfi

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Manuscripts are of different quality. We have stuff like Book of Hours of Duc de Berry: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  It's on finest vellum, with gold illumination, expensive paints and great craftsmanship. And we have mass production manuscripts like Diebold Lauber, made on cheap paper with recycled graphics. AI told me once that Duc de Berry could cost 100 times as much as Lauber. It may be a wild guess but I think a value between 10 and 200 times as much is valid.

The Gutenberg bible was available in two versions, paper and parchment vellum parvelluchmemnt animal skin.  IIRC, the latter cost 4x the former.  So, depending on how much of those costs were for labor, the skin itself  could be 5x to 10x more expensive than paper.

Unless the skin version had some extra frills, like hand-colored initials or miniatures, gold trimmings, etc.

All the bestm --stolfi

(No AI models were molested for this post.)

[eggyk]

For the purposes of most research, wouldn't it be best to assume the lowest plausible creation cost? If we have no idea either way, we should be excluding as few potential creators as possible.

[Bluetoes101]

I'd think the lowest cost possible is 0, they made all the materials and completed it themselves. 
But then, they could have sold all the materials and done something else with their time. 

I think it's impossible to put an all encompassing cost that covers all possibilities, but they can be portioned up into possibilities and then the likeliest possibility chosen. Much of the quibbling about cost doesn't seem to be who got their maths right, but who thinks what way was the most likely.. and it's another never ending circle until someone figures it out.. Maybe 116 reads

"Pox Leber! The scoundrels charged me 196 pence for this book and I can't read a damn word!" 

then we will know..

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'd think the lowest cost possible is 0, they made all the materials and completed it themselves.

Vellum making (and leather making in general) is a laborious and smelly process that requires specialized tools, frames, know-how and and skills.  Not very fancy, but not trivial either; not things that a generic scholar or student would have.  No matter how poor the VMS Author was, it is far more likely that he bought, begged, or scavenged that vellum, than he made it himself.

People who used iron-gall ink usually made it themselves, because it would not keep for a long time.  They may collect oak galls in the woods, but the other main ingredient -- green vitriol -- was harvested from puddles inside old copper mines, and thus had to be bought.  (Although, as I have explained before, I believe that the VMS ink is not iron-gall but more like a watercolor.)

All the best, --stolfi