20th Century Voynich Manuscript!?

Copies of a curious little apparently enciphered object were being given away in Dillons Arts bookshop about 12 years ago: I saw this last year mentioned on Cylob's blog (he's a musician now living in Berlin), but haven't found any further mention of it anywhere on the Internet.

To my eyes, it looks like a simple substitution cipher (you can see several of the shapes repeating, and you can probably guess at least some of the vowels), with a kind of vaguely pigpenesque quality to them (so there is probably some underlying rationale behind the alphabet). Maybe one day I'll ask Cylob for a copy & post a transcription here...

Mona Lisa overkill...

Why is it that so many people wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci created the Voynich Manuscript? Even well-informed, thoughtful people like Edith Sherwood (whose Adwords ad frequently pops up if you happen to Google for "Voynich") manage to succumb to this notion.

There's only one little problem: the VMs' pen-strokes predominantly go from top-left to bottom-right, clearly indicating that it was written by someone who was right-handed. (Or left-handed, writing from right-to-left with the pages upside-down: but that just seems a bit stupid). In terms of identifying the author, that's about 10% of the population eliminated: but, sadly, this is the tranche containing our Florentine chum Leonardo.

It's probably symptomatic of what I call "join-the-dots history", where you start with a set of evocative pieces and then work out the minimum amount of evidence you need to appropriate / use / abuse to link them together in a way that suggests some kind of correlation. For example, if you started with the (fake) Priory of Sion, Leonardo da Vinci, and Opus Dei... errrrrm... no, that would never work...

Anyway, here's the latest real news on Leonardo: apparently, the Mona Lisa was indeed a picture of Lisa del Giocondo, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and was being painted in October 1503. We have a "Heidelberg library expert" called Armin Schlechter to thank for finding this: and thankful I am.

What, *another* Voynich novel?

Another Voynich-inspired (I'm yet sure whether or not "Voynich-themed" might be putting it a bit strongly) novel to add to the ever-fattening Big Fat List. Australian writer Matt Rubinstein's novel was called "A Little Rain on Thursday" (the picture is from f75r) when it was published last June in Oz by Text Publishing: it appeared here last July (published by Quercus) under the title "Vellum". Amazon Marketplace has copies for £1.98 + £2.75 UK p&p: I've ordered one & will post a review here ASAP. It doesn't appear to have any evil Jesuit priests in it, which has to be A Very Good Thing Indeed.

What's sort of appealing (well - to me, at least) is the way he casually slips the words "marginalia" and "forensic" into the cover blurb. However, this may well be a weakness, given that to keep him fed and watered in writerland, his book has to sell to a large number of non-Voynicheros, to whom such things are usually fairly alien (even if they do watch CSI).

Oh, and the stuff in the story about the manuscript decipherer being obsessive may also have alienated him from passing VMs-ologists. We're not obsessive, I tell you: we count the number of stars on each section of each page for scientific reasons, damnit! Errrrrrrrrrm...

...maybe he's got a point. Oh well... :-((((

Spectacular MS408 dance/theatre production (yes, really)...

Here's a trailer for a Voynich Manuscript-inspired dance/theatre production (courtesy of YouTube). Lots of nymphs and Voynichese back-projection, if that presses your buttons...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi28Djh4LfM

The Voynich Information Browser...?

I don't know how I managed to miss this before: a nice little site holding the interlinear comments and transcriptions for Voynich Manuscript pages, with b&w images. A text extractor too!
http://voynich.freie-literatur.de/index.php

Hmmm... maybe the Voynich wikibook does this better now. Oh well...
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/The_Voynich_Manuscript/Page-by-page_commentary