01-11-2025, 03:26 PM
(01-11-2025, 07:57 AM)rikforto wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If pressed on the matter, I do think if it is a meaningful text then it is more likely to be genuine in this case, if only because it's proved a very crafty cipher that was well ahead of even the 20th Century's huge increase in cryptographic tools and know-how, and that's such an incongruous choice if Voynich's goal was to cash in on a newfound Bacon.
I didn't actually address this point in my last response: "... if Voynich's goal was to cash in on a newfound Bacon."
I apologize if this is repetitive, but to that point, I doubt this was created as a Bacon work to begin with. So if I am correct here, with Voynich already being committed to the text, he may not have no longer desired it to BE deciphered, once he shifted to pushing Bacon as author. And poor Newbold got caught up in all this, eventually tarnishing his posthumous reputation with his awful description suggestions. In that case, Voynich would breathe a sigh of relief at having Newbold direct and obscure the real underlying meaning for him, in a rather dramatic and public way.
And Newbold had quite a monetary incentive, as he was promised a great deal of money if "Bacon stuck", and then led to a sale of the work. Before I reported on this, it was assumed and reported that Voynich didn't offer to pay him anything, that his findings were therefore unbiased and pristine. But I photographed this note in the Voynich archives, which tells us differently:
That may be the only place you will see that note, as I don't think I've shared it, and I don't think anyone else has. I think it is Anne Nill's shorthand, and it describes an offer to Newbold of 10% of a sale up to $100,000, and 50% of anything over that. This would have amounted to over $170,000 in today's dollars.
So, in short, if Voynich succeeded in cashing in on his "new found" Bacon attribution, it very much... IMHO... have served him, and was serving him, to not have the Voynich deciphered... assuming it could be deciphered. But I still do not agree that meaning favors genuine, in this or any other case. Hopefully though, if it has meaning it is deciphered at some point, and that may offer us the answer.