Fakery?

[Linda]

I don't know, it seems to me that if I had the means to make good facsimiles of documents in demand (or rather my own versions of such things as maps or herbals, as there is no actual copying going on here, just me jotting down encrypted notes about a document, then making my own version of it), and I could easily sell one a week, or the equivalent thereof, for profits that kept those also involved well enough paid or fed as the case may be, then I might not do anything further with my encoding system unless further secrets came to be known to me. 

I would likely not be in the same position again, having since become an entrepreneur, after having possibly gained my knowledge as an assistant to someone else's cartographic works, or been a friend of someone who did that who allowed me some time with it, or having found an old chart in some castle somewhere. Someone would likely show me another map along the way, and I might make more cryptic notes and or update my system. But I don't think I would sell my encryption system, that would be no way to keep my own encryptions safe. The documents i would sell would be translated back to whatever language of the people i was selling to. Therefore there would only be the documents of my family or atelier as the case may be that were encrypted, and only we would know how to read it, and hopefully we would all be trustworthy to each other. Likely if our maps or herbals were successful, we would likely continue to develop them and be cartographers or herbal publishers proper, even if we began with a mnemonic freehand cheat sheet. If I am correct about the vms authors selling maps, they could be some of the names mentioned in the history of portolans, most of which have no surviving exemplars. Otherwise they are likely in the unnamed, no examples group, and we are no further ahead in that way. I don't know about the herbals, but they would look more realistic in the sold versions, so might not be immediately comparable.

I think the reason someone might put effort into making a phony five dollar bill is they would be easier to pass, being less suspect than higher dollar phonies which are often more deeply scrutinized. Plus you don't make one, you make thousands of them, what's a few more if you have unlimited supply. It is not really comparable to selling facsimiles or my own version of something that i happened to sort of copy the first time, but not copy, more like try to remember as much as i could remember about it and turn it into a recipe for making my own version. It might compare somewhat to offering maps which are made more quickly than the standard ones (that are evidently made with templates, pinpricks, and soot)  and mine might not include all the place names known to date like the newest ones would, but i'd be selling at a lower price to find my own cut of the market acceptable to me and my fellow scribes. I don't know, just imagining a situation that could possibly explain the existence of the vms.

I don't think lost time on the vms is truly lost, I have learned things for having done the research, which is generally useful regardless. I think the vms is sort of a magic book that way, to have led to so many differing ideas and theories, but everyone is learning while doing so it can't be all bad.