Re: VMs: Mishandling the VMs

[<elillie@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello all.

Gabriel answered Dana's posting about the possible date that some of the
folios went missing based on Newbold's descriptions with:


> On Sunday 26 June 2005 07:38, Dana Scott wrote:
>> It appears that these 6 leaves, 12 folios, were removed sometime
>> between 1928 and when the VMs was donated to the Beinecke Library by
>> H.P. Kraus.>
> Perhaps this was discussed earlier, but now it can be narrowed down
> further to  between 1928 and 1931, when Mrs. V took a 1st generation
> photostats to  Hyvernat at the Catholic University in Washington, from
> which Petersen took  another copy and made a hand transcription. Those
> pages are not in the  Petersen collection (now at the Marshall> library).
>
> Cheers,
> Gabriel

Checking in my copy of Newbold finds that he did indeed show folios 59 -
64 as still being a part of the VMs. As to their content, he doesn't
single these folios out with an individual discription, but that he
numbered them as part of the first or "botanical" section (folios 1 - 66)
and not as a seperate grouping shows that their contents were similar to
those remaining: a couple of additional text-only pages and 10 or 11 with
more drawings of plants or possibly some more circular drawings similar to
57V.
I would speculate that the prime time for folios 59 - 64 to have gone
missing was right when the photostats that Mrs. Voynich took to the
Catholic University were made. The fact that they are all in a group
suggests that that section may have been loose when they were taken to the
copyists. If you've ever tried photocopying a book with a loose quire or
span of pages in it, you soon discover that they will fall out at EVERY
OPPORTUNITY! Especially if some of the pages tend to stick out a bit ---
like the pages in the VMs. If we could determine where the actual
photocopying of the manuscript was done, there may be some mention of the
loose pages and of what actually became of them.
Another avenue of promise suggests itself when reading Newbold's book. His
own finished work makes up only a part of the work as he died before he
could complete more than a couple of chapters and a few tables of values.
In the forward, Roland Grubb Kent, who completed his friend's work, gives
a list of the materials he had at hand to work from. Among the items
listed are: Notebooks containing deciphered texts and other materials,
Photographs and photostats of manuscripts, hundreds of loose sheets and
miscellaneous papers. If these materials could be located, information
about the missing pages or even photostats of them may be present as
Newbold died in 1926 and had been working on the manuscript since at least
1921 or 1922.
Even if we discount most or even all of Newbold's conclusions about and
translations of the manuscript, the fact remains that he had access to
photos of the manuscript that were probably more complete than the ones we
have today (if missing folios were then present) and in some cases of
better quality than the current ones. What has been obscured over the
years by wrinkles(like 70V2: the Pisces Folio) is still visible while a
photo of the upper left section of the Rosette folio shows more text
because the corner is folded over much less.
I speak of the original printing of "The Cipher of Roger Bacon", not the
current printing offered by Kessinger Publishing.
Erni


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