knew that when a book is bound in vellum it may hide in its heart unexpected treasures. The habit of Voynich to search in covers of old books has been recorded in Zimmern (1908) It was also mentioned above that the pastedowns were probably removed by Voynich. The Boccaccio MS mentioned above seems to have undergone a similar fate, as it has quite similar insect holes as the Voynich MS The manuscripts were subsequently rebound. Tells us that the MS collection was described, sometime in the 18th Century, as “old books infested by worms”. Research performed by staff of the Historical Archives of the Gregorian Library in Rome, which has been recorded in their blog Interestingly, Manfred Staudinger, who has researched the account ledgers of Rudolf II preserved in Vienna, once remarked that the Voynich MS could hardly have been owned by Rudolf II, because it should have had a very different binding. From discolouring on the first and last folios it was furthermore concluded that these wooden boards were covered by tanned leather The woodworms just nibbled at the first and last pages and the location of the wormholes matches well with the places where the insects could move in and out of this cover. From this, it could be concluded that the original binding of the MS almost certainly had wooden boards. As pointed out by the conservators who inspected the MS for several hours in the Folger Library in Washington in November 2014, these insects are not at all interested in parchment, but in wood. There are insect holes in the first and last folios of the MS. The earlier cover of the MS has not been preserved, but we are able to learn something about it from forensic analyes. From all this we know that the present cover of the Voynich MS was added (presumably replacing an earlier one) by the Roman Jesuits, i.e. Where we read that this was done by the Jesuits of the Collegium Romanum. That this collection of mansucripts has been rebound is briefly mentioned in the catalogue of Vat.Lat. These images clearly show the common type of cover. Since then, several of these manuscripts have been digitised and are visible online, e.g.: Have identical covers, and she confirmed that the one of the Voynich MS is quite similar. Christine Grafinger of the Vatican Library that the vast majority of manuscripts among Vat.Lat.11414 – 11709, which also originate from the same collection sold by the Jesuits in 1912 In these manuscripts we can see that new paper pastedowns have been added. a Boccaccio MS now in Chicago, and a Petrus Candidus MS now in Harvard The cover of the Voynich MS is very similar to that of other manuscripts that Voynich acquired at the same time, e.g. The pastedowns and the filling materials were almost certainly removed by Wilfrid Voynich himself, shortly after he acquired the MS. The cover also shows remnants of paper pastedowns (see right-hand picture above) that have been removed. It used to be stiffened by filling materials. While the official Yale description of the MS cover calls it a limp vellum cover, this is not what it was originally. However, in November 2014 the professional parchment maker Jesse Meyer of Pergamena identified that the cover parchment is made of goat skin While for all folio samples the species was identified as 'cow', the cover sample could not be matched to any species. This is achieved by extracting protein from the samples and matching them with samples from known species These were sent to a York in order to identify the species of the animal from which the parchment was made. In a collaboration between the Beinecke library and the University of York (UK) in July 2014, eraser crumb samples were taken from approximately 10 places in the MS, and on my recommendation also from the cover. This tells us that the cover is not original to the MS, and must have replaced an earlier cover. >Beinecke library description of the Voynich MS calls the cover of the MS a limp vellum cover of the 18th - 19th C. The cover of the Voynich MS is of blank parchment that does not provide any indication of its origin (year, title or author). Special Topics: Description of the MS The Cover and Binding of the Voynich MS The present cover
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