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VMs: Re: John M. Manly's 1922 Harpers article...

Hi Seth,

> The physical mark of the writing implement on the page - ie, a pen leaving
> its furrow. IIRC, these indentations are normally photographed by lighting
> the page very nearly parallel to its plane. :-)

This isn't usually visible on vellum.  Consider that the pen would
likely have been a goose or similar quill, or less likely a reed pen.
Vellum presents a very sturdy surface, so usually any indentations
found on vellum are from a scoring knife used to mark up lines
(obviously not used on the VMS), not from the pen.

Thanks! Philip Neal has some interesting ideas about this - he believes that there *may* be subtle scoring lines evident in the recipe/almanacke section (though possibly not where you'd expect). :-)

  This is one of
the reasons that vellum is so easily erased with a scraping knife,
which scribes kept handy for scraping out errors.

...hence the low number of obvious corrections in the VMS? Yeah, that would make sense. :-)

For what it's worth, metal nibs were not in common use until the 1700s.

ISTR seeing some early 16th Century metal nibs in the Hanse@Medici exhibition currently on in Bruges... though I may have the date wrong (I wasn't paying too much attention). If any of you are in Bruges during this summer, check it out. One of the sites also has a copy of one of Luca Pacioli's books on display, open to the page with his hand-reckoning system.

If you're interested, there's also a cool Van Eyck show on in town... and the very best bar in the world, the Brugge Bear (I am not worthy, I am not worthy).

Cheers, .....Nick Pelling.....