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

[Nick Pelling <incoming@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

On a recent trip to the British Library, I thought I'd read through the 
Voynich-related letters and cuttings in MS Facs 439.

I found the the letters largely uninformative: but the cuttings were quite 
fun. There was a lot of detail on Newbold's deciphering assault: 
interestingly, Newbold describes the VMS' code explicitly as a 
steganographic micro-stroke extension of Roger Bacon's "luru vopo.." 
anagrammatic cipher (which I didn't know, despite having read a lot about 
recently), only with a still smaller cipherbet (with many plaintext symbols 
sharing a single cipherbet symbol).

John M. Manly, in his article in Harpers Monthly, argues that a critical 
part of Newbold's theory is his claim that the code had been executed using 
incredibly small pen strokes, which would have only been possible had Bacon 
had a magnifying lens setup to aid him.

The key part of Manley's discussion runs like this:

	The ink with which the writing is done is thick, almost of the
	consistency of printer's ink; the surface of the vellum is rough.
	It seems almost certain that such an ink applied to such a
	surface not by pressure, but by the sweep of a pen or brush,
	would break up into just such shreds and filaments as the
	microscope shows in these symbols. I cannot speak
	positively on this point, because it is only recently that I saw
	these marks and I have not yet been able to find an ancient
	vellum manuscript written with ink of this consistency; but
	a microscopic examination of old printed books undertaken
	several years ago for another purpose lends probability to
	this view. Moreover the strokes have a freedom of sweep
	which does not seem compatible with the theory that they
	are built up carefully and painfully of minute bits.

The curious thing is that I don't recall these kinds of issues as having 
been definitively resolved, even up to the present day. They do raise some 
interesting questions in my mind, such as:

Ink-related questions:
(1) *is* the VMS' ink atypically thick?
(2) does any other source think it might be similar to printer's ink?
(3) what function could such thick ink have performed?
(4) would the author have needed to use a different ink for (eg) detail on 
the 9-rosette page?

Microscope-related questions:
(5) Are there any micrographs of the VMS' surface still in existence?
(6) If so, are there any scans of them on the web?

Writing-related questions:
(7) Are there any signs of writing indentation on the pages?
(8) What writing instrument was used for the lettering? Quill, metal pen, 
brush, etc?
(9) Was the same individual writing instrument used by both Hand A and Hand B?

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

PS: one thing Newbold mentioned that I thought was worth noting explicitly:

	Of the letters, 14 are derived from Greek tachygraphic signs.

As I've been in contact with a group (not far from me) who are compiling a 
dictionary of Greek tachygraphy (a kind of modern-day Greek Capelli), I'll 
take another look at that soon...