John, my notes say that line 2 of that paragraph is in red ink. That
may be true also of the outermost ring of text. This page and f1r seem
to be the only ones with colored text.
I would be *highly* surprised if the maker of the VMS were completely
unaware of the tradition of "red letter" feast days in almanackes. Red
highlighting was a very well-known convention for denoting importance or
"information-bearingness" (for want of a better word).
If you also suspect that colour is used in the VMS for information-carrying
purposes and not just for decoration (I'm thinking specifically of the
starred paragraphs etc), then the few instances of red text would seem
likely to be of importance to the writer - though perhaps not to the reader. :-9