Quote:Morten St. George: I'll concede that it was very naive of me to think that Yale would have hired competent scanners, ones smart enough to know that they should place a blank sheet behind pages containing large holes so as to avoid reader confusion. I've learned my lesson and may now be even overly skeptical of what many people have to say about the VMS.
I actually prefer to see what is behind the hole because I've seen manuscripts where the information behind the hole and the hole itself have been meaningfully related to one another.
Sometimes it also shows where a cut or wormhole or other detail in the manuscript goes through several pages, which can yield useful information about the manuscript's provenance. The less they mess with the manuscript while scanning, usually the better.
One of the mysteries of the disappearance of early colonists in Greenland was solved with information gleaned from long-dead flies on windowsills. It's amazing what kind of information small details can reveal. Even the wormholes in the VMS are important because word-boring worms, for example, can reveal previous binding materials and sometimes even previous binding order, since wood-borers don't usually go very far through parchment.