[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Is there an assumption why the last zodiac pages are so faded? Was the ink weak from the beginning? Are these pages older or were they subjected to sunlight for long periods (on top)?

My guess is that, for several years after it was written, the VMs was kept as a stack of separate quires; each quire being either unbound, or bound all by itself, as a booklet.   

In the Zodiac section, each bifolio presumably was a quire by itself, as it is now.  In that case, when folio f70 was folded in, Aries Dark (f70v1) was the last page of quire 10; Aries Light (f71r) was the first page of quire 11; when folio f72 was folded, Libra (f72v1) was the last page of quire 11; and Scorpio (f73r) was the first page of quire 12.  The last page of quire 12 would have been on folio f74, which is missing (and appears to have been cut off after the book was bound; it may be the sample that Georg Baresh sent to Athanasius Kircher).

So, if the quires were kept unbounded, those pages above would have suffered more from rubbing and exposure to sunlight than the pages inside the quires.  That may explain why some Zodiac pages are more faded than, say, the Biology pages.

All the best, --jorge