There is no obvious punctuation, and no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with star- or flower-like " bullets" in the left margin. The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Ī page showing characteristics of the text While most of them represent common motifs, the illustrations appear also to be unique to this manuscript. The manuscript is written in an elegant, but otherwise unknown script and almost all its pages contain illustrations of unknown plants, constellations or systems of tubes transporting liquids and populated by tiny, pudgy 'nymphs'.īased on modern analysis, it has been determined that a quill pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines.Ĭolored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what we see today. From the various numbering gaps, it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912.
The top right-hand corner of each recto (right-hand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, probably by one of the manuscript's later owners.
The manuscript has approximately 240 pages in total, depending on how some of its unusual fold-out multi-part pages are counted. Some annotations on the inside cover have been made by later owners. It has a limp vellum cover, added at a later date (probably the 17th century), without any indication of its origin (year, title or author). The manuscript is a parchment codex in octavo, measuring 23.5 by 16.2 by 5 centimeters (9.3 by 6.4 by 2.0 in), made of hundreds of vellum pages collected into eighteen quires.
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