RE: VMs: It's Origin and Purpose

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've been having small problems with sending to the list lately. This was
one item I sent a few days ago... but Robert's latest message is a good
place to send it again. It doesn't make sense to create that much detail
into a prop - and it doesn't make sense in my opinion for the forgery
concept either....



	Some interesting discussions on Mr. Voynich's life, but the forgery concept
in my opinion would have to be one bizarre forgery. One would think that a
skilled forger would try to make something that followed all the commonly
accepted behaviours of 15th/16th century publishing. The quire signatures
and foliation would line up and be in the correct order as I believe most
documents that have quire and foliation numbers do. Unfortunately, this
manuscript has obvious evidence that the foliation took place after the
loose sheets were bound together and ignorant of the existence or purpose of
the quire signatures or just ignored the quire signatures.

	The one glaring quire signature that shows the folio numbers were written
after the loose pages were loosely piled into some degree of order is quire
9. The person who did the binding didn't have a clue what the document
consisted of and somehow managed to put quire 9's signature at the front of
the fold-out instead of at the end where it should be. A quire signature
should be on the last verso page of the quire (as it is in most of the
quires). A couple of quires were folded in on themselves in an
expected/standard manner - but the foliation that took place after the
quires were bound together ignored the internal folds so fold-out quires
often found the quire signature on a different 'folio number' than the
expected last-verso number.

	Whether the original author wrote the quire signatures or not, it would
appear that whoever did mark the quires had a pretty good grasp of the
content of a quire - as opposed to the foliation marker who obviously just
marked the top-right corner of the facing pages without ever looking at the
order the pages were in, or bothering to note that a page was still the same
page of a large foldout and assigning it two folio numbers.

John.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Robert Antony Hicks
Sent: Monday, January 06, 2003 5:56 PM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: VMs: It's Origin and Purpose


The VMS surely cannot be anything as mundane as a prop, simply because of
the vast amount of time it would have taken to produce.  As a rough estimate
-

200 pages, each page requiring an illustration (1 hour per illustration) and
'structured' text (1 hour) = 400 man hours, or about 2 weeks of non-stop
work.  That's a very conservative estimate, too.  Two people (Hands 1 and 2)
would still need over a week of non-stop endeavour.  If three people worked
8 hour shifts in rotation (1 doing the illustrations, 2 doing the text), we
still require about a week.

It just wouldn't make any sense to write the thing unless it meant
something.
Rob








_________________________________________________________________
Add photos to your e-mail with MSN 8. Get 2 months FREE*.
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/featuredemail

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list


______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list