Page order

["John Grove" <4groves@xxxxxxxxx>]

Good Morning all,

    An early owner of the VMS was carrying the loose sheets of vellum and
tripped, dropping the sheets into a confusing pile. He was able to put most
of the obvious pages back in some semblance of order, zodiac pages were easy
enough - and since the pisces was on the back of a cosmo page obviously the
cosmo pages must go before the zodiac ones. But how could he be sure which
pages went where when so many just had single plant images on them. Quickly
stacking the loose pieces back into a pile, he decided on a rough order and
had them bound together.

    Well, that's the scenario... Now for the reshuffling of a few pages:

    First, I think we could put all the Herbal-A pages in one section and
all the Herbal-B in another. When we do this, we notice that two Herbal-B
pages have something other than Herbal-B on the opposite side. These begin
f57r and f66v! So, if we looked at the opposite pages f57v and f66r we find
that we're looking at material that COULD go into another section. Hmmm,
let's say that the odd-shaped nymph at the bottom of f66r is the same odd
shaped nymph leaning over a bucket in f84r and that f66r actually belongs
with the bio section. Now, f57v contains four elements in its midst and you
might find several variations of these four elements on the verso side of
the large foldout, so perhaps f57v is part of the cosmo pages - as is the
large foldout itself...

    The new order then becomes something like all Herbal-A pages in one
section, All Pharmaceutical Pages, The Bio pages ending with f66r, All
Herbal-B pages beginning with f66v and ending with f57r, The Cosmo pages
beginning with f57v, followed by the reverse side of the large foldout and
ending with f70 recto foldout, The zodiac pages on f70 verso, and lastly all
the Star pages - including f58r/v.

    The order within some sections is obviously still confused, not knowing
which side is actually recto or verso of some vellum sheets. I'm not sure
what to think of the f49 or f65 sheets yet, and one can't be certain where
to place sections that don't overlap in content such as the Pharmaceutical,
stars, and Herbal-A. It seems (to me) that The Bio pages, Herbal-B, Cosmo,
Zodiac order makes sense though.

    John