Tiny Spanish publisher to ‘clone’ world’s most mysterious book – a centuries-old manuscript of strange plants and naked women
The precious documents is believed to have been written six centuries ago in an unknown or coded language that no one – not even the best cryptographers – has ever cracked
It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one – not even the best cryptographers – has been able to crack.
Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich Manuscript – an intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women that some believe holds magical powers.
The book is locked in a vault at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. But after a 10-year quest for access, Siloe, a small publishing house in northern Spain, has secured the right to clone the document – to the delight of its director.
“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia at Siloe’s office in Burgos. “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.”
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.