[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections

[RenegadeHealer]

I think because you can see the corrections, that would be counterproductive. Thus, one would draw attention to the deception especially because people get stuck with (rare) mistakes. It would be best in such a case, to do nothing and hope that the reader just do not notice.
It is more likely that the author has really made mistakes. Especially because repetitions in the VMS are nothing unusual.

To us 21st century netizens with all sorts of digital tools for parsing images and a chronic interest in a captivating ancient mystery, I agree. The addition of deliberate but questionably necessary pen strokes to words is more suspicious, and is much harder to explain with the natural language hypothesis, than a text where every word was clearly left as-is after one attempt. That said, if the VMS is a meaningless hoax, I question how obvious these corrections would have been to the intended mark book's target audience. I can imagine they'd go unnoticed to the vast majority of the books's pre-20th century beholders, who'd at most give the book a casual leaf-through in dim light, before deciding they can't comprehend it and losing interest in it.

Torsten, I have to say, the pattern of corrections you've pointed out leans me a bit in the direction of the cipher hypothesis. Of the major three hypotheses about the VMS's origin and purpose, the cipher hypothesis is the one I've explored the least, but this discussion makes me want to look deeper into it. If this were a cipher that the author wanted to be able to decrypt accurately in the future, it seems reasonable that he'd plan a careful rough draft, check over the final copy for accuracy against his rough draft and/or the encryption device, and fix any errors that would potentially hinder decryption. Were your thoughts swayed in this direction at all?