05-02-2026, 06:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 05-02-2026, 06:36 AM by Jorge_Stolfi.)
On You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the five known books owned by Jacobus, I see that the one labeled "No//4", the only one with the same form of the name, is kept in the National Czech Library, housed at the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in Prague. (By coincidence, the same library that Rene and I got to visit in 2000.)
I suggested before that Wilfrid could have forged Jacobus's ex-libris on f1r in order to make the "Bacon" theory more credible. For that, he presumably would have made a list of people from Rudolf II's court who could have received the "Bacon's 600 ducats book" from him and passed it to Marci's "good friend". Then he would have asked his contacts in Europe to look for any book which had an ex-libris from any of those people. They were to send him a photo of any such ex-libris, or at least a careful tracing of it on vellum paper (which has nothing to do with vellum other than the name).
Jacobus would probably have been on that list; and then anyone in Prague would have immediately found the "No//4" one.
And maybe he was told that the number "19" could be safely used for some reason (say there was a record that someone sometime had looked hard for it but concluded that it had been lost.)
According to the Forged Signature Theory, Wilfrid would then have copied that "signature" on f1r, trying to make it look like it had been written in ~1600. But the result still looked very much like a forgery, so he decided to "enhance" it with chemicals until only a trace remained -- just enough to "prove" that MS 408 had been owned by Jacobus, but not nearly enough to tell whether it was a forgery or not.
Or perhaps he later got copies of book "Ho//40" from the Charles University library (also very easy to obtain), and/or of the "N/7." and "N/18." books from Strahov's library (a bit harder to obtain perhaps; but Rene and I came within 50 meters of them in 2000, too, and they may even be in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I took from the library's lobby). And then he realized that the form of the name that he had used in the forged "signature" was the wrong one for the supposed "No//19" book...
All the best, --stolfi
I suggested before that Wilfrid could have forged Jacobus's ex-libris on f1r in order to make the "Bacon" theory more credible. For that, he presumably would have made a list of people from Rudolf II's court who could have received the "Bacon's 600 ducats book" from him and passed it to Marci's "good friend". Then he would have asked his contacts in Europe to look for any book which had an ex-libris from any of those people. They were to send him a photo of any such ex-libris, or at least a careful tracing of it on vellum paper (which has nothing to do with vellum other than the name).
Jacobus would probably have been on that list; and then anyone in Prague would have immediately found the "No//4" one.
And maybe he was told that the number "19" could be safely used for some reason (say there was a record that someone sometime had looked hard for it but concluded that it had been lost.)
According to the Forged Signature Theory, Wilfrid would then have copied that "signature" on f1r, trying to make it look like it had been written in ~1600. But the result still looked very much like a forgery, so he decided to "enhance" it with chemicals until only a trace remained -- just enough to "prove" that MS 408 had been owned by Jacobus, but not nearly enough to tell whether it was a forgery or not.
Or perhaps he later got copies of book "Ho//40" from the Charles University library (also very easy to obtain), and/or of the "N/7." and "N/18." books from Strahov's library (a bit harder to obtain perhaps; but Rene and I came within 50 meters of them in 2000, too, and they may even be in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I took from the library's lobby). And then he realized that the form of the name that he had used in the forged "signature" was the wrong one for the supposed "No//19" book...
All the best, --stolfi
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