If you are looking to get this as a Christmas gift, note that there are actually two versions of the Voynich Manuscript being published this year.<p>The one mentioned here is a photographic reproduction done by the Yale Press, and is available from major sellers like Amazon for a reasonable price: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/dp/0300217234</a><p>The other is a little more exotic. The Spanish publisher Siloé has been authorized to make a limited-edition 'look and feel' replica. They will handmake 898 full facsimiles, down to the wormholes in the pages. The expected price is €7,000-8,000.<p>So if you are asking for a copy for Christmas, make sure to be be specific to avoid a (possibly) disappointing surprise!<p><a href="http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito-voynich/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.siloe.es/siloe-editara-la-replica-del-manuscrito...</a><p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscript-exact-replicas-to-be-made-of-worlds-most-myst/" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/21/voynich-manuscrip...</a>
I'm not sure how a photo-print of the manuscript will help cryptographers. Doesn't the digital version available at archive.org provide better opportunities for analysis?<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript</a><p>For example, a friend of mine is fascinated with the Zodiac Killer's unsolved ciphers, so he put the note into a program, where you can replace the cryptic symbols in the serial killer's note with various letters:<p><a href="http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.oranchak.com/zodiac/webtoy/</a><p>A printed-book of the Voynich Manuscript--to my mind--actually <i>reduces</i> the ability of cryptographers to decode it (if there's even anything there to actually decode[1]). I would love to see the symbols in this book broken out into a font where we can run statistics on them, replace them with various letters from different alphabets, and seek patterns in their occurrence.<p>[1] An analysis of the manuscript found the distribution of words " is not compatible with natural languages": <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07435</a>
Maybe I don't hang in the right circles, but has anyone done a serious look for number words? I can't imagine that document would be void of quantities, especially in the recipes section.<p>Counting and enumeration systems can reveal a lot about where something is from.
I still haven't heard of a better theory explaining Voynich Manuscript than this one: <a href="https://xkcd.com/593/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/593/</a>.
This is one of the most fascinating unsolved puzzles I've read about. I like to believe in the "alien" theory although it seems the least probable :)