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RE: VMs: Search for missing folios, quires et al.

Hi everyone,

At 09:13 28/06/2004 -0400, John Grove wrote:
If you were to send portions of an unknown manuscript to a scholar for
deciphering, wouldn't you send them samples from the various contexts...

Say cut out one herbal page (folio 12),
cut out one zodiac foldout (f74... [in my opinion more than one panel here]
take out a large foldout that makes up a quire on its own - content unknown
(91/92)
take out a second large foldout - probably pharmaceutical (97/98).

Oh, and don't forget to add the central bifolio from quire 20 for a bit more statistical spice. :-)

        On the same concept, if Voynich sent portions (59-65) to scholars for
opinions - why did he choose one context only - or was there more to those
pages than common Herbal pages as possibly indicated by 57v and 66r? I
wonder if Voynich thought those pages in particular laid out the information
needed (along with some pictures) to decipher the text.

What happened to those bifolios? They were missing at the time of the Petersen transcription, so neither Petersen nor ELV had them in 1931.

It's unlikely that they were stolen while WMV was alive: the VMs was too dear to his heart for him not to have noticed and raised some kind of alarm. The manuscript is quite small, so they might conceivably be misplaced somewhere inside some (apparently irrelevant) notes in his Grolier Club boxes - and that would definitely be the first place I'd check.

I'm not convinced that it was sent to a scholar or expert by WMV: given his high personal valuation of it, there would surely have been a paper trail?

Finally, there was a narrow window of opportunity in 1930-1931 (between WMV's death and the start of Petersen's transcription) when these bifolios ~might~ have been opportunistically stolen. All the same, this seems quite unlikely to me.

Mysterious.

Really, I think the Grolier Club in New York is just about the only obvious place to look for clues as to what happened. Anyone here care to make a weekday detour to 47 East 60th Street between 9am and 5pm? :-)
http://www.grolierclub.org/library_use.htm

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


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