In 2013, Tablet contributor Batya Ungar-Sargon wrote a fantastic article about the Voynich Manuscript, a 240-page work written in code, which incorporates an indecipherable script (the alphabet contains between 20 and 30 characters), and pictures and diagrams, and many, many (illustrations of) “naked ladies bathing in pools and holding hands.” It is named after a book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, “who first began to mention it in his correspondence in 1912.” It remains “a mysterious manuscript has plagued historians, mathematicians, linguists, physicists, cryptologists, curators, art historians, programmers, and lay enthusiasts alike… After 100 years, the manuscript’s language still has yet to be deciphered.”
Cool, right? Yes, très cool.
Now, a Spanish publishing house has won the rights to clone and reprint the Voynich Manuscript, which is housed at Yale University. Reported The Guardian:
Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, 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.
Said Raymond Clemens, curator at Yale’s Beinecke Library: “It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.”
Copies will sell in the range of $8,000 to $9,000. Hundreds have already lined up, as though it were a trip to the Mars, which it very well might turn out to be. It will take the book cloners 18 months to make a perfect copy.
Related: Cracking the Voynich Code
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
