Manly's views about the Voynich MS

[LisaFaginDavis]

Picking up this thread to report that I spent all day yesterday reading and photographing Nill's correspondence with Garland (manager of the London shop) at the Grolier Club in NYC. I don't think there's much of interest buried in there in terms of Manly's thoughts on the VMS, at least nothing that doesn't show up in the Speculum article. What I did find interesting, and rather sad, were Nill's increasingly desperate and poignant letters to Garland in the wake of Voynich's death in 1930 - debt, sluggish sales due to the 1929 crash (after which dependable buyers like Robert Garrett had to back off), and of course grief. A tough triple-blow. They had hoped that Manly's forthcoming review of Newbold in Speculum (which, you may know, is published by the organization of which I am executive director, the Medieval Academy of America) would make the VMS marketable by giving it some scholarly credibility, the lack of which had made it essentially unsellable in the 1920s in spite of the publicity generated by Newbold's work. Unfortunately, the 1931 piece in Speculum was such a savage demolition of Newbold's work that it seems to have had the opposite effect. When Nill started dismantling the business in the early 1930s, setting up several Sotheby's auctions and desperately trying to sell their remaining stock of books and manuscripts to collectors and small US collections, they kept the VMS not because they thought it was of particular value, but because they just couldn't find a buyer. Univ. of Michigan couldn't afford it. The New York Academy of Medicine was interested, but didn't have the cash. Baltimore collector Robert Garrett was fascinated by it, but had been essentially wiped out by the crash of 1929. Ethel began her work on the plants during this period, partially as a way to distract her from her grief over Wilfrid's death. In the end, the VMS was basically all she and Anne had left of Voynich's business. [this time period will be subject of my lecture at the Grolier Club on March 4]