VMs: Quire 9's greenish ink...

["John Grove" <John@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 

    Oh no - not quire 9 and page order stuff again !

 

            For all the colour specialists out there - check out the folios of quire 9. What I'm seeing is some pages used a much darker greenish ink for the text than the normal brown translucent ink. What I'm also seeing is that the darker greenish ink is looks like it could suggest that the pages were not written on one side of a sheet of vellum before the other...

 

        f67r2 (the real first page of the quire) is in the dark green ink, f67r1 (the misplaced first page) is not - and they share the same side of vellum. However, if the pages were written in the order f67r2, flip the vellum f67v2,v1 (all three share the greenish ink) - then the 68r1/2/3 which weren't scanned  were probably green as well since the ink's use continued beyond those to 68v2,1. The next quire begins with the normal ink.

 

        The only folio that appears to use the 'normal' ink in quire 9 is f67r1 (the real last page) which shares the same side of vellum as the real first page but was not written at the same time that side of the vellum was used (at least if one assumes the author didn't switch ink bottles while working on the same side of the vellum). I know it's weak and could be just my monitor showing the writing on these pages to be darker than the others - but it might suggest the author wrote on folio, flipped the vellum wrote the next and returned to the original side when he got to the last page of the quire.

 

        John.