The Voynich Manuscript, a folio of mysterious illustrations and hand-written texts written in an unknown language or code, has been bedevilling linguists and cryptographers for almost 600 years. Radiocarbon dating of the book’s vellum leaves found it was produced between 1404 and 1438, and even though the ink cannot be dated at present, researchers believe the manuscript was written relatively close to the parchment’s age. There’s a documented history of alchemists, scholars, occultists, even one emperor (Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II) succumbing to its fascination since the 1600s. It fell off the radar in the late 17th century only to be rediscovered in 1912 inside a trunk at the Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome by Polish antiquarian and book dealer Wilfrid Voynich.
Voynich was obsessed with attempting to decipher the manuscript, dedicating the last 18 years of his life to the pursuit. Since then, everyone from professional codebreakers from both World Wars to amateur puzzlers have tried to crack the code. It has become the a cryptological Holy Grail, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which was owned the volume since 1969, gets thousands of emails a month from people claiming to have cracked the code. Fully 90% of traffic to the library’s website goes to the digitized images of the manuscript.
The Beinecke Library gets constant requests to loan the codex out to museums, institutions and researchers — it is the second most requested book after the Gutenberg Bible — but they mainly keep it locked up in a vault for its own protection. If everyone who wanted to turn its pages did so, its condition would quickly deteriorate. In 2005, a small Spanish publishing company called Siloé which specializes in printing precise facsimiles of historic manuscripts learned of the Voynich Manuscript and campaigned with the Beinecke to be allowed to make a specialized reproduction of it. Ten years later, the deal was done and the obscure publishers in the historic center of Burgos in northern Spain were granted the right to make the first ever copy of the Voynich Manuscript.
Siloe … has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich — so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.
The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones — a number which is a palindrome, or a figure that reads the same backwards or forwards — after the success of their first facsimile that they made 696 copies of… another palindrome.
The publishing house plans to sell the facsimiles for 7,000 to 8,000 euros ($7,800 to $8,900) apiece once completed — and close to 300 people have already put in pre-orders.
The first high resolution photographs of the 252 pages of the manuscript were taken earlier this year and Siloé experts are now working on mock-ups. It’s no easy task reproducing a codex that has lived a rich and varied life over 600 years. Each folio is bound by hand and the delicate vellum has been exposed to diverse, sometimes damaging, climactic conditions. Some pages are dehydrated. Others are almost burnt from exposure to heat and light. Then there are the complexities inherent in this particular codex which has leaves that unfold into triples and quadruple pages.
Once the images are sorted out, the book will be printed on special paper developed by the company. Made from a thick paste, the paper will be treated so that the final product has the stiff feel of the Voynich vellum. The printed pages will then be then bound and aged to match the original.
It’ll be about 18 months before the first facsimiles go to print. The 300 copies that have already been sold in advance were all purchased by individuals — institutions have to wait to buy things when they actually exist — but one of the main reasons the Beinecke agreed to the copy was so facsimiles to go to museums and schools for scholars to peruse without fear of damaging the original. There must be some sort of reservation option with such a limited run already being more than a third claimed. I could find no means to preorder on the publisher’s website. Perhaps there will be more information available on the site once we get closer to publication.