Not the best full-color facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript out there, but the introduction provides a decent introduction to the thing, and the addition of quire diagrams with each image is useful. ( )

I don't regret buying this book, I just regret that it wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I thought I was getting the full color pages not obvious copies of the original book. I've seen better versions and to be honest, I got this because the price was so unbelievably low, it was a case of I couldn't pass it up. However, if the better full-page version crosses my path sometime in the future, I'll probably get it and give this copy away. It's still fun to look at and admire. ( )

Several years ago, Yale University, which holds the Voynich Manuscript, released hi-res scans of the Voynich Manuscript to the public on the internet. Since then, a number of low quality prints have been available in bookstores. Some were just reprints, some high quality attempts at reproductions, some e-books (people shelling out 99¢ for something they could get for free), and some accompanied by earnest, but sophomoric, attempts at a translation.

In 2016, Yale University Press released an edition of the manuscript with life-sized pages, foldouts, and essays. It retails for $50, and is pretty nice.

In 2017, Watkins, a publisher of sort-of metaphysical/esoteric titles, has released this edition at about half the cost of the Yale edition. The images are a bit smaller, and a tad more blurred (I think, cheaper-quality paper is to blame), and there are no foldouts (which are expensive to reproduce). There are some nice essays and a "quire map" by Voynich aficianados Rafał T. Prinkle and René Zandbergen.

(Note, it is not a straight up facsimile [like an Indy grail diary you can buy online], and the images are reproduced a little less than their actual size, so don't buy it looking for blow-ups of the pages. They have an internet for that.)

If you are a Voynich Manuscript fanatic, get this, but get the Yale version first. If you are a Voynich Manuscript novice, get this first and work your way up to the Yale version. ( )

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.) ( )