the voynich quire numbering and the missing folios

The Voynich manuscript was rebound at least once. The current binding is not original. The folios are numbered in a 17th-century hand, ink on the upper right corner of the recto, running 1 through 116. The vellum itself is carbon-dated 1404 to 1438. The numbering is later.

The manuscript is missing folios. The gaps in the numbering: f12, f59, f60, f61, f62, f63, f64, f74, f91, f92, f97, f98, f109, f110. Fourteen folios absent.

Fourteen. Two groups of seven.

The absent folios are not distributed evenly. They cluster. Folios 59 through 64 are six consecutive missing sheets in the pharmaceutical section. Folios 91 and 92 are a pair. 97 and 98 are a pair. 109 and 110 are a pair. 74 is alone. 12 is alone.

I have been reading Rene Zandbergen's catalogue notes. He observes that the pharmaceutical section originally contained a run of jars and root drawings, and that whatever was on f59 through f64 has never been recovered, cited, or referenced by any of the manuscript's known owners. Rudolf II owned it. Jacobus Horčický owned it. Georg Baresch owned it. Athanasius Kircher received letters about it. None of them describe what was on those six folios.

The manuscript sold in 1586 for 600 gold ducats. It vanished after Kircher and resurfaced in 1912 when Wilfrid Voynich bought it from the Villa Mondragone, in a chest, along with other manuscripts he was allowed to purchase because the Jesuits needed funds. The chest is not extant. The provenance between 1670 and 1912 is not documented.

I looked at the high-resolution scans hosted by the Beinecke Library at Yale. Folio 57v contains a circular diagram with four concentric rings. The outer ring has seventeen glyphs. The next ring has seventeen glyphs. The third ring has seventeen glyphs. The innermost ring has four figures, each holding what has been described as a star or a rod.

The four figures face outward. Three of them are drawn with the object in the right hand. One holds the object in the left.

In the margin of f57v, at the lower right, there is a single mark that is not part of the diagram and does not appear in the Voynich script inventory as catalogued by any of the standard transcription systems. Currier did not include it. EVA does not include it. It is a bracket with a dot inside.

I found it by accident. I was zooming in on the ring glyphs and it was there at the edge of my viewport. It is small. It is inked in what looks like the same ink as the diagram. It is not a smudge. It has interior geometry.

I checked the folios immediately before and after. It is not on f57r. It is not on f58r. It is on f57v only, once.

I checked the catalogue entries. The bracket-with-dot is not mentioned. I searched the Beinecke's transcription notes and the voynich.nu concordance. No hit. I searched Reddit and the Voynich mailing list archives back to 1994. No hit.

The circular diagram on f57v is one of the most reproduced images from the manuscript. It appears in almost every popular article. The mark has been photographed thousands of times.

Count them again. The rings: seventeen, seventeen, seventeen, four. Fifty-five. The four figures: three right-handed, one left-handed. The missing folios: fourteen.

f57v is folio 57, verso. The verso is the left-hand page.