On vellum and drying ink

[ReneZ]

The ink used for the Voynich MS is iron gall ink, which has a very light brown colour. It turns dark as the result of a chemical reaction with the parchment which sets in fairly immediately. It leaves the scribe almost no time to wipe it off, and something will 'enter' the parchment in any case.
The most common way to erase a piece of writing is by scraping the parchment.
Otherwise, the text may be amended as mentioned by JKP.

It's of interest to add a quote from a letter by Anne Nill, which is most probably one of the souces for the lack of corrections in the Voynich MS. (D'Imperio clearly spent a lot of time going through the correspondence preserved in the Beinecke).


To Theodore Petersen, 19 Feb. 1953.

I remember I talked too much, but did I really say "the ms. does not include a single erasure or correction"; whatever I said, this is my present opinion: in all my experience of manuscripts I have never come across one in which corrections and erasures are so unobtrusive as they are in this ms. if it contains any. I have looked through it again - of course not every word, and have nothing to add to the one or two probable corrections I recorded c. 1936 when I worked with photostats.

In this connection I must add that we still have a few Voynich estate mss. (requiring additional research which I never found time for, before I attempt to sell them) which include one beautifully written text on fine vellum and some well and some poorly written manuscripts; and in none of them is there any difficulty in detecting corrections, erasures, deletions or transpositions.