May I point out that all the guessing and second-guessing about what would have been a natural or likely course of action, that is included in the last more than a dozen posts, amounts to zero evidence?
Voynich could have....
Voynich should have...
Yes, also: Kircher would have...
It is all entirely subjective and means nothing.
Most people here are interested in the MS as a historic item.
Voynich was not. For him it was business. All his books were objects that he wanted to sell at as good a price as possible. Bacon's authorship determined this price. Not the book's later history.
They were also his, i.e. his possessions. He would remove and dismantle bindings, and make annotations on their pages. That is not specific for Voynich, by the way.
These are recorded facts: he had the MS in 1912 (read Sowerby), and he just knew a few names from the letter as late as 1915-1918 and actually misunderstood the identity of the key people.
Furthermore, he became interested in the history of the MS only as late as 1919-1921.
I will follow my own advice and not start any speculation whether any of this is unusual, why he changed his mind, etc etc.
Not even what this implies about the probability that he created this letter in the first place.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the fake theory is a story that has now been posted here twice, if I have seen it correctly, namely Voynich's proposed visit to the Mondragone, where he would have been given the entire Kircher correspondence to take home for a while. Entirely hypothetical, and without any form of evidence.
Yet it tells me that Rich realises that this would have been necessary.
Also, that he was dealing with the Jesuits (which we knew anyway). At this time, he was securing the acquisition of some of their manuscripts, which he would be able to sell at a great profit.
These 30 or so manuscripts are never mentioned in the frame of the fake theory, perhaps because they basically destroy Voynich's main possible motivation, and drastically reduce the time frame for the creation of such a fake.
The fake theory does not provide a timeline, but he could have only started considering making a fake illegible MS after seeing the Barschius letter (if he did). This timeline would therefore be extremely challenging.
Voynich had made a blanket offer of 100 US dollars for each MS that the Jesuits would sell him (although he may have paid more for the first few - I don't know that).
100 dollars in 1911-1912 is quite a lot of money, but he sold his first two already early 1912 for a combined 60,000 US dollars, and he was offering others for 150,000 US dollars, more than he even asked (later) for the Voynich MS. This was a huge deal and it is not a stretch of the imagination that this must have been the foremost thing on his mind.
Again, and superfluously, all this is only secondary to the question of the authenticity of the MS.
Voynich could have....
Voynich should have...
Yes, also: Kircher would have...
It is all entirely subjective and means nothing.
Most people here are interested in the MS as a historic item.
Voynich was not. For him it was business. All his books were objects that he wanted to sell at as good a price as possible. Bacon's authorship determined this price. Not the book's later history.
They were also his, i.e. his possessions. He would remove and dismantle bindings, and make annotations on their pages. That is not specific for Voynich, by the way.
These are recorded facts: he had the MS in 1912 (read Sowerby), and he just knew a few names from the letter as late as 1915-1918 and actually misunderstood the identity of the key people.
Furthermore, he became interested in the history of the MS only as late as 1919-1921.
I will follow my own advice and not start any speculation whether any of this is unusual, why he changed his mind, etc etc.
Not even what this implies about the probability that he created this letter in the first place.
One of the most remarkable aspects of the fake theory is a story that has now been posted here twice, if I have seen it correctly, namely Voynich's proposed visit to the Mondragone, where he would have been given the entire Kircher correspondence to take home for a while. Entirely hypothetical, and without any form of evidence.
Yet it tells me that Rich realises that this would have been necessary.
Also, that he was dealing with the Jesuits (which we knew anyway). At this time, he was securing the acquisition of some of their manuscripts, which he would be able to sell at a great profit.
These 30 or so manuscripts are never mentioned in the frame of the fake theory, perhaps because they basically destroy Voynich's main possible motivation, and drastically reduce the time frame for the creation of such a fake.
The fake theory does not provide a timeline, but he could have only started considering making a fake illegible MS after seeing the Barschius letter (if he did). This timeline would therefore be extremely challenging.
Voynich had made a blanket offer of 100 US dollars for each MS that the Jesuits would sell him (although he may have paid more for the first few - I don't know that).
100 dollars in 1911-1912 is quite a lot of money, but he sold his first two already early 1912 for a combined 60,000 US dollars, and he was offering others for 150,000 US dollars, more than he even asked (later) for the Voynich MS. This was a huge deal and it is not a stretch of the imagination that this must have been the foremost thing on his mind.
Again, and superfluously, all this is only secondary to the question of the authenticity of the MS.
![[+]](https://www.voynich.ninja/images/collapse_collapsed.png)