Speculative fraud hypothesis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

The history of forged/fake/hoax/fraud books goes back practically to the invention of the book, and it was done for every motivation one can conceive of, and probably many that would elude us today: Recognition, politics, money, an expression of artistic skill, personal satisfaction... and really any combination of those. And, at every cost, and every skill level imaginable, on any material, old and new, and at every level of time and effort, for all the reasons we can imagine, and not.[ ... ]  Every type of fake book and document was made for every single reason at every level of cost and time and every level of expected return from zero to a great fortune. [... ]Here is my "Forgery Bibliography"  You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.  [ ... ] Here is one of my own examples of an "homage" book, made at great expense of materials, time and effort, simply for personal satisfaction. [ ... ] You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Great post and great resources!  But still... all the motives that you found for creating fake books can explain the creation of thousands of fake books of all types, I still don't see how they could explain the creation of the VMS specifically.

I would guess that the "fakiness" of the vast majority of the fake books in your bibliography is very obvious to us today.  That includes the "out of novel" or "out of game" fan-books, the alchemical herbals, that  Chittenden book, the Codex Seraphinianus, and many more.  The cases where the fakiness is not obvious to us today are either forgeries which were skillfully made to look like some real but lost book (like the Hitler diaries) or which were incomprehensible for centuries but turned out to be not fake at all (like the Rohonc codex and the Soyga tables). 

The VMS clearly does not belong to the first two categories above.  I still believe it belongs to the third one...

All the best, --jorge