The writing will not be decipherable to you. Turn the covers-as Umberto Eco once did it was the only book in the Beinecke’s famous collection that he cared to see-and you are greeted by writing in brown ink accompanied by strange diagrams and paintings of plants. The manuscript’s Renaissance-era cover (it was rebound) is made of what the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale, calls a “limp vellum.” The book has resided at Yale’s library since 1969. Yale’s new facsimile is somewhat larger, as it includes wide white margins for the amateur cryptographer’s own marginalia.

The manuscript is two hundred and twenty-five millimetres tall, a hundred and sixty wide, and five centimetres thick. The Voynich Manuscript has charisma, and charisma has lately held a monopoly on our attentions. A new facsimile, edited by Raymond Clemens and published by Yale University Press, draws attention to the way that we think about truth now: the book invites guesses, conspiracy theory, spiritualism, cryptography.

Nobody can decode the language the book is written in. But no living person has ever, as far as we know, understood it. We know, thanks to carbon dating, that it was put together in the early fifteenth century. The Voynich Manuscript is a special kind of original. It cannot be standardized any more than a thing can be unburned. This is not what’s happening, physically, but it makes sense as a metaphor: a medieval manuscript, because it was made by hand, is necessarily an original, even when it is a copy of something else. The word “ink” is a child of the Latin incaustum, which means “having been burned.” In the Middle Ages, people thought that ink burned its way into parchment, because iron-gall inks go onto the page pale, then darken. Photograph Courtesy Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University / Wikimedia Commons The manuscript was made in the ordinary medieval way, but the script was apparently invented by whoever made it.

Voyage manuscript