[Design of Marci Letter]

[proto57]

Seriously: first, congratulations for seeing things that were quite obvious but somehow were not seen by the hundreds (tens of thousands?) of Voynichologists who scrutinized and analyzed that letter from every possible angle.  Including myself...

I think it says something general about the whole discipline and community.  But let's leave it at that.

IIUC, that tab along the left edge of the letter would have been originally glued on the inside of the original front cover ("page f0v") just next to the binding gutter, in the area that is now covered by the flap of vellum that reinforces the (new) binding.  Correct?

So the letter must have been detached when the book was rebound by the Jesuits (if indeed it was).  And then it must have been re-glued to the new cover -- if we are to take Wilfrid statements and that newspaper article literally, as you propose.

But if the letter was at some point glued to the new cover, before Wilfrid showed it to the public, we cannot tell whether it was the Jesuits or Wilfrid who glued it, right?

About Andrew's suggestion that the small fold might have been a glued "tab": This caused me to look more closely at Lisa's light table image of the Marci Letter, and lo and behold there is something there... some irregular deposit:

   

And although I only show a short section of it, it actually extends along the entire tab, and further, does not seem to be anywhere else on the Letter. I think that stain- or deposit?- really ought to be looked at more closely, and possibly tested in some ways, to learn what it is.

Rich