I'm pretty sure you're right. All kinds of biases lead to an overexposure of the most beautiful examples. Not only modern biases, I presume. How much more likely is an expensive book of hours to be kept and properly maintained, compared to some obsolete notebook with doodles?
As an imperfect parallel, think of the way we look at paper encyclopedias now. With the rise of Wikipedia, second-hand bookstores were inundated with them. From one day to the next, they had become completely obsolete.
My point with this example is the following: a book that was once appreciated, may become a useless burden to the next generation, and hence be discarded or lost. It is only some generations later that appreciation for the object returns due to its antiquity.
In the arts, this happened to an extreme degree with wall tapestries. Once a popular form of decoration, at some point they fell out of fashion and had to go. Some of our most precious remaining examples were preserved by accident.
Especially relevant for the Voynich is probably the genre of "Hausbuch", which I assume must have undergone the fate of the encyclopedia at some point. There are all kinds of awful drawings in those, but I assume the prettiest ones had the best chance of survival.
As an imperfect parallel, think of the way we look at paper encyclopedias now. With the rise of Wikipedia, second-hand bookstores were inundated with them. From one day to the next, they had become completely obsolete.
My point with this example is the following: a book that was once appreciated, may become a useless burden to the next generation, and hence be discarded or lost. It is only some generations later that appreciation for the object returns due to its antiquity.
In the arts, this happened to an extreme degree with wall tapestries. Once a popular form of decoration, at some point they fell out of fashion and had to go. Some of our most precious remaining examples were preserved by accident.
Especially relevant for the Voynich is probably the genre of "Hausbuch", which I assume must have undergone the fate of the encyclopedia at some point. There are all kinds of awful drawings in those, but I assume the prettiest ones had the best chance of survival.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)