Voynich manuscript - first steps


I visited the Royal Dutch library and looked through their catalogues.

 I found a copy of: Kraus, H. P. Catalogue 100. Thirty-five manuscripts:
including ... the Roger Bacon (Voynich) cipher ms. New York: H.P. Kraus,
1962.

I was locked up in a room with TV surveillance and was only allowed to use a
pencil.  The original B/W photographs are very good and I now have an A3-sized copy
of the Marci letter and of the 3*3 foldout with the "asteroid with organ
pipes" in the middle.

The Marci letter:

One of the folio's - you need all four to reconstruct the whole page:

The copies were not so expensive, but the quality of the copies is not very good.
I was taken aback by these strange drawings (stranger than anything I
remember from the Beinecke website) and I was very much reminded of the
drawings of the schizophrenic Swiss artist Adolf Wölfli:
http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/woe_4.d.cfm or http://www.kunstmuseumbern.ch/woe_5.d.cfm

I also borrowed: Brumbaugh, Robert S. The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript
and noted that there is a chapter about the sunflower.
Unfortunately http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-01-17-sunflower/
is *not* the plant that has been identified as a sunflower.
With Brumbaugh in hand the identification doesn't look so unlikely. Plants
have been simplified regularly in old herbals.

Here is the original tekst about the sunflower:

This is a very good idea:
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/98-01-27-plant-names/PlantNames.ht
And I'll try (work permitting) to post a long list of plant names from old
herbals. It's in a Dutch book on the history of botany.

I bought a Czech book about "Mysterious Prague" in Prague and it's popular
but seems rather well researched.
It mentions the Voynich MS several times.
It even says that Arthur C. Clarke speculated that it might be an early
example of "automatic writing" :-)
I'll try (work permitting) to scan and post the relevant pages.


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© 2002 Petr Kazil - Mail me at this obfuscated address: kazil A T euronet D O T nl