(07-07-2025, 06:03 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The length of the VMS by itself is not a problem. The problem is that the forger wrote 250+ pages of a complex invented language and bizarre illustrations, without adding a single element that would have made the book more attractive to the intended victim -- like some recognizable alchemical symbols, pictures of sick people being cured, intriguing weapons sketches, etc. And he also choose to use all the vellum that he had, instead of discarding or trimming parts that were obviously bad (like f68r4, f72r4, f102r3, f112r...)
Still, it's not very hard to come up with explanations for these that don't seem very far fetched to me.
Suppose, the manuscript was intended to represent a book from a faraway land with roughly known contents and roughly known imagery. Say, it went something like this:
Lord Gully: I heard there was this famous Indian book of Great Wisdom called something like Voynibharata, I don't remember exactly. It's a family lore, my great great great grandfather saw it during the last crusade, not a big book, but hundreds of pages, with a lot of pictures of exotic plants and stars and dancing nymphs, all drawn in weird Indian style, and written in some Indian script, and it had weird foldouts like a huge map of the mystical world. It was said the book had all the secrets of the world and whoever could read it would possess the power of Thor become immortal and there was only one copy left, and it's hundreds of years old and has the signs of age. If only I could find it, it'd pay a fortune.
A good friend: Hmm, I know a guy who knows a guy who is in the middle eastern book business. I could try pulling some strings. What else do you remember about this book? Any specific images?
Lord Gully: I was told the only recognizable thing in it was the Zodiac signs...
A good friend: And about how much would you pay exactly if I had it delivered to your castle gates in a year or so?.. I would certainly make sure you get the maximum discount possible, given the book is basically priceless.
Now, the forgers know the size of the book, general idea about the images (nothing recognizable except the Zodiac) and that the book should be hundreds of years old. But there is a slight problem. For a modern person a piece of vellum is a piece of vellum. But I can imagine in the Middle Ages seeing vellum all the time, you could get from its appearance some general idea about its age and preparation. So, to forge an old book, the forgers would need old vellum and preferably from the same batch, so that nothing sticks out in terms of color, texture, etc. And to create the foldouts, there should be larger pieces. So, the forgers had to include some pretty bad pieces of vellum, because that was the only vellum they could use to make the book look realistically old.
This scenario of course would imply that the manuscript was likely created some time in the 1500s or even very early 1600s, but this is not a problem as I see it, and it would nicely explain why there is no provenance of this allegedly rare and expensive artifact recorded for 150+ years prior to it appearing in Prague.
The above is just to show that in principle there are scenarios that would explain the size, the contents and the state of the vellum. I'm not arguing for them seriously, I just don't see how the probability of a hoax could be as low as 0.01% or even 0.1%. To me it looks like it certainly should be higher.