Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 6	[1998 January 7]
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Publishing the Manuscript.

As a possible publisher, you might want to consider

	Phanes Press
	PO Box 6114
	Grand Rapids
	Michigan 49516
	USA

Their number is +1 800 678 0392 but I think that's just for orders
or catalogue requests.  Anyway, their 1991-1992 catalogue has a lot
of Renaissance and modern weirdness, including things like The Chemical
Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz (the last and strangest of the
Rosicrucian manifestos), Boehm's "Clavis", the "Splendor Solis",
"Atalanta Fugiens", and, of course, the Harley MS on angel magic.

I have no idea whether a published Voynich would sell, but gee, if
they can sell (as they do) a complete facsimile of St-Germain's
"Trinosophia", then they can probably sell anything!  Of course,
a decipherment would help, as somebody else pointed out.

[Note: Unfortunately, Phanes Press couldn't sell anything.  Indeed,
they later got into serious financial difficulty and now seem to be
moribund, except that they still publish a yearly volume of 'Alexandria']

Colour reproduction seems very expensive, but I think at least some
of the botanical and herbal folios should be reproduced in colour,
not least in the hope the plants can be identified.

And yes, I definitely believe we should publish a commentary.  Both
an historical introduction (maybe the Beinecke would like that piece
of the action) and an edited account of our work.  For this reason:
one of my major frustrations with this endeavour is how much seems
to have been done before but is now lost.  We have papers by Currier
that are "unpublished", machine transcripts that are lost; proposed
decipherments missing all detail; claims that a botanist (who?) has
identified many of the plants (which? as what? on what basis?), and
so on.

We are repeating history.  Every previous study group seems to have
devised a transcription scheme, argued over what is a letter, entered
chunks of text, done letter and word counts, researched the history
of John Dee, and so on.  And I fear that, in another fifteen or
twenty years, somebody is going to do it all over again.  Even if
we don't publish, I think a fair copy of our musings should be
run off, bound, and presented to the Beinecke for posterity.

Finally, we should append a bibliography.  D'Imperio's is a very
good start, but a lot of stuff has been reprinted since 1978, and
we could update and expand it, with her permission.

Robert