
Facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript Now Available to Citizen Cryptographers - misnamed
http://hyperallergic.com/335505/voynich-manuscript-facsimile-published-yale-university/
======
nkurz
If you are looking to get this as a Christmas gift, note that there are
actually two versions of the Voynich Manuscript being published this year.

The one mentioned here is a photographic reproduction done by the Yale Press,
and is available from major sellers like Amazon for a reasonable price:
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234)

The other is a little more exotic. The Spanish publisher Siloé has been
authorized to make a limited-edition 'look and feel' replica. They will
handmake 898 full facsimiles, down to the wormholes in the pages. The expected
price is €7,000-8,000.

So if you are asking for a copy for Christmas, make sure to be be specific to
avoid a (possibly) disappointing surprise!

[http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-
manuscrito...](http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito-
voynich/)

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-
manuscrip...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscript-
exact-replicas-to-be-made-of-worlds-most-myst/)

~~~
kybernetyk
>The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized

Authorized by whom? I mean there's surely no copyright protection for the
original anymore. (I hope at least but you never know).

~~~
jwdunne
With a manuscript that old, you'd need authorisation to look at it so you can
see all the worm holes and artifacts.

~~~
jonathankoren
Authorization to maintain the integrity of the artifact yes. Authorization to
publish a copy of it? No. High resolution PDFs are freely available[0] and
there already exists a crappy bound edition of these PDFs[1].

(Do not buy the linked to book. It's very subpar. Multipage foldouts are
shrunk-to-fit, and there's no accompany text. It's literally, just the
archive.org images printed and bound.)

[0]
[https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript](https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript)

[1]
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_deta...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1599865556/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

~~~
jwdunne
Yeah but my point is that it will be pretty hard to produce a replica where
you charge thousands per book with just a high resolution PDF alone.

You want to see how the book looks in 3D, in real lighting and at different
angles. A PDF cannot convey how that will look. The only way to produce a high
quality replica is to look at the real thing and work to match how it really
is.

They would need authorisation for that access.

~~~
jonathankoren
Yeah but that still doesn't mean that Yale Library authorized the production
of the the replica. They authorized access to the original. Nothing more. I
can go to any library or museum and once granted access do anything I want
with the data I acquire. Now granted, they may be curious about why I wanted
access, and maybe I'd even do it under supervision in order to mitigate
damage, but the data and the manifestation of that data becomes my own
original transformative creative work. The library doesn't own it, or even a
part of it, unless a specific agreement was made regarding that.

------
ideonexus
I'm not sure how a photo-print of the manuscript will help cryptographers.
Doesn't the digital version available at archive.org provide better
opportunities for analysis?

[https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript](https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript)

For example, a friend of mine is fascinated with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved
ciphers, so he put the note into a program, where you can replace the cryptic
symbols in the serial killer's note with various letters:

[http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/](http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/)

A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually _reduces_ the
ability of cryptographers to decode it (if there's even anything there to
actually decode[1]). I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out
into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various
letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence.

[1] An analysis of the manuscript found the distribution of words " is not
compatible with natural languages":
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435](https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435)

~~~
codingdave
> I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we
> can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different
> alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence.

Odds are, if there was a 1-to-1 relationship between symbols and letters,
someone would have figured it out by now. So a font may be statistically
interesting, but probably not a major tool towards solving the puzzle.

~~~
reitoei
Username checks out

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kristopolous
Maybe I don't hang in the right circles, but has anyone done a serious look
for number words? I can't imagine that document would be void of quantities,
especially in the recipes section.

Counting and enumeration systems can reveal a lot about where something is
from.

~~~
coldpie
The short answer is "probably, yes". This thing's been pretty exhaustively
analyzed. After an afternoon of armchair research, I personally felt the
evidence lead most to a fascinating fake made much later than its claimed
origin date in order to fetch a high asking price. In any case, check it out
sometime, it's fascinating. I may pick up this reprinting.

~~~
Nursie
I also find it fascinating.

Have you read Stephen Bax' paper on partial decode based on botany?

[https://stephenbax.net/?page_id=11](https://stephenbax.net/?page_id=11)

I find it quite compelling.

~~~
coldpie
I have not, thank you for the link.

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TeMPOraL
I still haven't heard of a better theory explaining Voynich Manuscript than
this one: [https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/).

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vcool07
This is one of the most fascinating unsolved puzzles I've read about. I like
to believe in the "alien" theory although it seems the least probable :)

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FuNe
What would the explanation be according to Occam's razor here?

~~~
CocaKoala
The Occam's Razor explanation has already been proposed by Randall Munroe:
[https://xkcd.com/593/](https://xkcd.com/593/)

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qwertyuiop924
...So, anybody up for a game of Druids and Dicotyledons?

Yes, everyone else already linked the strip, but I couldn't resist.

