The Voynich Manuscript, a 600-year-old book no one can read, is about to become a bestseller.
Siloe, a small publishing house in Spain specializing in handcrafted replicas of ancient manuscripts, has been granted the exclusive rights to create 898 facsimiles of the Voynich. The illustrated codex is considered by many to be the world's most mysterious book, having flummoxed professional and amateur cryptographers since its discovery by a Polish book dealer in 1912.
“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time, it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe,” Juan Jose Garcia, the editor of Siloe, told AFP.
An artist from the Siloe publishing house sews a page from a replica of the Voynich Manuscript. The mysterious book will be reproduced down to every stain, tear and sewn piece of parchment. (Photo: Cesar Manso/AFP/Getty)
No ordinary scan and print project, the Voynich replicas will be meticulously crafted to match every "stain, hole, and sewn-up tear in the parchment," according to the news agency. The publishing house has even created a secret paste and aging process to make the more than 200 pages of the book appear and feel indistinguishable from the real thing. The process is expected to take a full 18 months to complete.
Siloe had reportedly been petitioning the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale, which took possession of the Voynich in 1969, to publish a replica for the last 10 years. The library finally acquiesced after both an increase in scholarly interest in the Voynich and quality assurances from experts associated with previous rare manuscript copies completed by Siloe.
“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke library, told the AFP.
“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.”
Some folks have labelled the Voynich Manuscript as nothing more than an ancient hoax, including Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the U.K., who has spent more than a decade studying the manuscript. Rugg writes in a new paper that the text would be easy to fake if the author was familiar with simple coding techniques. “We have known for years that the syllables are not random. There are ways of producing gibberish which are not random in a statistical sense,” he told New Scientist. "It’s a bit like rolling loaded dice. If you roll dice that are subtly loaded, they would come up with a six more often than you would expect, but not every time."
But other researchers don't necessarily agree. In a 2013 study published in the journal PLoS One, Dr. Diego Amancio, a professor at University of São Paulo's Institute of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, explained how the book's beautiful gibberish is likely an actual language.
"We show that it is mostly compatible with natural languages and incompatible with random texts," he writes. "We also obtain candidates for keywords of the Voynich Manuscript, which could be helpful in the effort of deciphering it."
Besides its indecipherable characters, the manuscript is also crammed with illustrations of astronomical charts, human figures, and plants, the latter of which have never been positively identified as anything found on Earth. These puzzles have led to the manuscript being classified as everything from the work of aliens to the musings of an inter-dimensional Medieval sorcerer.
Whatever the true answer, you don't have to shell out the expected $8,000 to $9,000 cost for an exact replica. In addition to offering high-res digital scans of the Voynich pages online, Yale will release a hardcover copy with accompanying research on the manuscript in November.
You can view a digital overview of the 250 pages of the Voynich Manuscript in the video below.
Editor's note: This story has been updated since it was originally published in August 2016.