[Design of Marci Letter]

[asteckley]

I think it's fair to say that we shouldn't expect answers to these questions, but it would be a disservice to VMS research to simply not bother probing wherever possible for leads. At the end of the day, who decides what is, and isn't worth investigating? And who decides what is and isn't worth the risk? Beinecke, I suppose.

It's definitely Beinecke's call —and reponsibility—to control access to the manuscript and letter. They are the library's private property, after all. But it's worth mentioning that so far, I've only found responses to my communications with them to be reasonable and helpful. I submitted a detailed proposal requesting permission to inspect the artifacts and take photographic imagery to answer a bunch of these questions. Not unexpectedly, they denied access to the manuscript  itself, but the curator responsible for those particular artifacts answered my request personally regarding my accessing of the letter to take special photographs.

My experience tells me that we are very unlikely to learn anything more by speculating and theorizing. 

Well, that's pretty clearly not true -- there's potentially much we can learn that would be of consequence. I've got to reiterate what I already said before:  if the letter can be physically connected to the manuscript then it would put to rest the entire Book Switch Theory and give solid support to the putative provenance story.  And  if some other codex were shown to have contained the Marci Letter, then everything we think we know of the manuscript before Wilfrid Voynich would collapse.