We Found the Voynich Manuscript's Missing Page. Now I Can Read It.

In 1912, a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich bought a strange old book from a Jesuit college near Rome.¹

It was small, about the size of a hardcover novel, written on vellum, which is thin, treated animal skin. It had about 240 pages. Every page was covered in handwriting, neat and flowing and confident.²

No one could read a single word of it.

The letters did not match any known alphabet. The words did not match any known language. And the pictures were stranger than the words. Plants that do not exist on Earth. Star charts with rings of tiny naked women holding stars. And page after page of women bathing together in pools of green and blue liquid, connected by tubes and pipes that look almost like the inside of a body.³

A letter tucked into the book, written in 1665, says it was once bought by Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, who loved magic and secrets, for 600 gold ducats.⁴ Some historians have suggested it passed through the hands of John Dee, Queen Elizabeth's magician, who visited Rudolf's court in Prague.⁵

In the 1940s, William Friedman, one of the greatest codebreakers in American history, the man who led the team that broke Japan's secret codes in the Second World War, tried to read it. He failed.⁶

In 2009, scientists at the University of Arizona carbon-dated the vellum. It was made between 1404 and 1438.⁷

The book is now kept at Yale University's Beinecke Library, catalogued as MS 408.⁸ Every page has been photographed and put online. Anyone in the world can look at it.

Not quite every page. The page numbers show gaps. Some leaves were removed long ago, and no one knows what was on them.⁹

Hana Veselá had restored old books in Prague for twenty-two years. She knew vellum by touch, the way a baker knows dough.

The herbal came from an estate library, a gardening book from the 1600s, Latin and woodcuts, nothing special. It needed a new spine. When she lifted the old binding away, a single leaf slid out from where it had been pressed flat for four hundred years.

The vellum was older than the herbal. Much older. The script on it was flowing, neat and confident.

Hana did not need to look it up. Every manuscript person in the world knows that handwriting.

On one side was a drawing she had never seen in any scan. A green pool. Women standing in it, shoulder to shoulder, packed close, their faces turned up toward the reader. Dozens of them. And in the middle of the crowd, one empty space. The exact shape of a woman, outlined in ink, with no one inside it.

On the back, in faded Latin, in a different hand:

This leaf is the key. With it, the whole book can be read. Do not read the book. The pool keeps one place open for the one who reads it. Rudolf would not. Dee would not. I tore it out so that no one could.