The Voynich Manuscript: The World's Most Mysterious Book

About this book

It was written in the early 1400s in a script that matches no known writing. Emperor Rudolf II is said to have paid 600 gold ducats for it, and the codebreakers who broke the Japanese and German wartime ciphers worked on it too. It is still unread. Now you can turn its pages yourself: strange plants, stars and zodiac wheels, bathers in green pools, and the great fold-out of nine rosettes. Download the PDF and start exploring tonight.

What were they hiding? A physician's secret remedies, an alchemist's cipher, an invented language, or a brilliant medieval hoax? This edition shows you all the evidence and lets you decide, with the alphabet, the word counts and the clues you need to form a theory of your own.

A complete facsimile of the manuscript in colour (images: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, MS 408, public domain), with our own text in English. For every page we describe what can be seen and, where they exist, what researchers think. The fold-outs are shown whole and section by section, so the small details can be seen. Honest by design: the manuscript has never been deciphered, so there is no invented "translation" here.

What is inside

• Every page of the manuscript in colour: the herbal, the astronomical and zodiac pages, the "bathers", the rosettes fold-out, the "pharmacy" and the "recipes", plus covers, spine and edges.
• The fold-outs whole and in sections; the nine rosettes one by one.
• The history of the mystery: Rudolf II and the 600 ducats, the Prague alchemist Baresch, Marci's letter to Kircher, Voynich's discovery in 1912, Friedman and the wartime codebreakers, the 2009 radiocarbon date (1404–1438).
• How people have tried to read it: cipher, unknown language, artificial language or hoax, and why every claimed decipherment so far has been rejected.
• The Voynich letters: an EVA alphabet table drawn in our own Voynich typeface.
• What can be read: the month names on the zodiac pages, the signature on the first page, the strange lines on the last page.
• What the numbers say: the commonest words, word structure, repetitions and Currier's two "languages", calculated from the whole text.
• A closing chapter with tips if you want to try reading it yourself.
• PDF, A5 page size (148 × 210 mm), 315 pages in full colour, readable on phone, tablet and computer; zoom in to see the details.

Who it is for

Lovers of mysteries and secret codes, puzzle and cryptography fans, readers of medieval history, the occult and old herbals, and anyone who has heard of "the world's most mysterious book" and wants to see it all. A memorable gift for a fan of dark academia, ciphers and unsolved riddles.

The manuscript has never been deciphered: there is no invented translation here, only descriptions of what can be seen and researchers’ hypotheses with their authors. Images: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (public domain). Digital PDF, delivered for download after payment.