Well, that was a bit of an anti-climax, although I’m not quite sure what I was expecting — a sudden, complete translation, that I’d look at it and my background in mathematics and cryptography would just reveal everything to me, even though clever mathematicians and cryptographers than myself have tried? I guess, yes, a little. In any case, my copy from Netgalley was fairly pixelated and impossible to make out the individual “letters”, so even if I’d been visited by an expected bit of genius, it wouldn’t have mattered much. So yeah, I did not crack the code.
There’s an intro and historical overview, not going as in depth into the math and statistical analysis as I would have liked. It was interesting, but didn’t tell me much more than I already knew. The pictograms on the bottoms of the pages in the actual manuscript, telling you where in each folio each page went, or how it was laid out on the fold-out pages, was helpful. But, in the end, like in my last book review, I wanted this to be a coffee-table book, not a blurry collection of squiggles on my ipad.
The Voynich Manuscript by ? went on sale August 15, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
(I have put that I want to connect with the author on Netgalley, who has yet to set up any seances for me with regards to dead authors.)