How good is your pareidolia?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

My limited experience with the quill suggests to me that the accuracy you need in this case is the same as the width of the stroke or even a bit less, so about 0.25mm, which is very precise, but manageable.

I had quite a bit of experience with pen-and-ink drawing in my teen years.  I bet I could do a bit better than 0.1 mm accuracy. But I used a steel pen with very sharp nib, and I was severely shortsighted back then, so I could look at the work from only a couple inches away.

I should have some samples somewhere.  Meanwhile, found my old pen and a few bottles that still had usable ink, in spite of their venerable age. (The trick is to keep them upside-down.)  

   

And I so I tried to see whether I could be hired by the Author to write Volume II, if Selene decided to wake him up ahead of schedule.

   

The size of characters is about the same as in "normal" VMS text (o-height ~1.5 mm) , and the resolution is about the same as in the Beinecke 2014 scans (~15 pixels/mm).  The pen strokes are ~0.4-0.6 mm wide. 

Granted, the result was, ahem, a bit disappointing.  But note that it was the very first time I used that pen in at least 40 years, that the ink has visibly degraded -- it is more watery than it should -- and the paper is not ideal for it. (That black blot near top right was a pen loaded too much ink.) And of course I am probably a bit older than the VMS Scribe was.  And, after two cataract operations, I have quite sharp vision but cannot focus any closer than 30-40 cm away.

And I also had to keep the pen upright, otherwise it would catch and dig into the paper on the NW strokes.  So I could not make any "mousetail" plumes and tails.

As you can see, I tried to retrace some of the red text with blue ink, but with very limited success.

So this experiment unfortunately does not quite support my claims.  But it does not refute them either, right.  Maybe someone with better eyes can do a better simulation of the original Scribe and of the Retracer.

By the way: while the original Scribe probably used a quill pen, the hypothetical retracing could have happened any time between 1500 and 1900.  So the Retracer could have used a steel pen, that AFAIK became fairly common in the early 1700s.

It is physically possible that someone retraced the text over hundreds of pages with the meticulousness and precision of a money forger. But why?

Because the original writing had severely faded, to near invisibility.  Look at f73r, for example.  Look for the faintest strokes; that whole page must have looked like that or worse when the owner decided to salvage it. Think of the retracing as the restoration of an artwork that must have been highly valued to the owner at the time.  He naturally wanted the result to be close as possible to the original state.  Think of how much money and time people and institutions are nowadays willing to spend to restore a painting, a statue, a mural...

All the best, --jorge