This CD contains The
Voynich Manuscript, which is one of the olds unsolved
code books ever discovered on earth. All known
pages are included on this CD-ROM disk in PDF format.
The
Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written
in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is
written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century
(1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Northern
Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The
manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book
dealer who purchased it in 1912.
Some of the pages are missing, with around 240 still
remaining. The text is written from left to right, and
most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams. Some
pages are foldable sheets. The codicology, or
physical characteristics of the manuscript, are studied
by various researchers. The manuscript measures 23.5 by
16.2 by 5 centimetres (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), with
hundreds of vellum pages collected into eighteen quires
(units of 25 pages). The total number of pages is around
240, but the exact number depends on how the
manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted. The quires
have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations,
using numerals consistent with the 1400s, and the top
righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been
numbered from 1 to 116, using numerals of a later date.
From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages,
it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at
least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already
missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in
1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's
bifolios were reordered at various points in its
history, and that the original page order may well have
been quite different from what it is today.
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many
professional and amateur cryptographers, including
American and British codebreakers from both World War I
and World War II. No one has yet succeeded in
deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in
the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning
and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular
imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels
and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed
over the last hundred years has yet been independently
verified.
