HOW VOYNICH WAS WRITTEN

[-JKP-]

I would like to note that many glyphs, as it is evident, underwent emendation by subsequent users of the book. Which would of course destroy the alleged micrography.

of course, but also rotating stencil onto letters to find microscopic simbols and rotating page folds onto wheels damaged the writing (especially zodiacal wheels)

So your idea is that a stencil was laid on the parchment, the scribe chose a shape that represents a phrase/word/syllable, scribed it with a special quill through a tiny opening in the stencil (which almost inevitably causes ink to bleed out under the stencil because this is iron gall ink NOT ballpoint pen ink), then the scribe waits a few minutes for the ink to dry (you can't put a stencil down on top of fresh gall ink without smudging the previous lines) and then lines up the new stencil with the end of the first line and creates a new line, etc., etc., until a phrase or sentence is encoded into one glyph.

Using your method, it would take a twenty minutes to one hour to create one glyph when you factor in the time it takes the ink to dry enough to lay a stencil down on top of the previous lines. A word would take two to four hours.


Try it yourself, with gall ink. You can buy it online. You can also buy quills online. Don't use modern inks, they are formulated differently. See how long it takes you to encode one word well enough so that someone who has been shown your code can read back the shapes.