My Theory: RITE — Ritual Instrument of Textual Esoterica

[Jorge_Stolfi]

An issue is the MS was something like £10,000 to produce, and a years work.

Where does that estimate come from?  

I read somewhere on the internet that the price of parchment or vellum at the time was the equivalent of about US$ 2 per folio in today's money.  The ink and quills must have cost pennies per page.  If that value is correct, it would mean about US$ 300 for the whole book.  

Still, that must have been a significant sum for the Author, considering that he chose to use every inch of the bifolios, including undersize flaps with irregular edges and several folios with holes right in the middle of important diagrams.  Or maybe he could not buy more parchment for some reason, so he just used some limited stock that he had.

As for the time, I estimate that each single-panel page must have taken 2 hours of Scribe time, at most. That would be 300 hours at most for the whole book.  If the Scribe worked two hours per day, five days per week, that would be 30 weeks, or about 8 months. If he worked 8 hours per day, it would be about 2 months.  If five Scribes worked in parallel, it would take only a couple of weeks.

Either way, the scribing may well have been spread out in sessions over several years.

As for the Author's work before the final scribing on parchment: if he wrote the draft by copying the contents from other books, it must have taken him only a fraction of that time --- 15 minutes per page at most.

All the best, --jorge

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All argue against language

This one here does not...