The arcane tome has a special place for Bellairsians: Prospero and Roger Bacon
must battle a curious grimoire with similar (or identical?) properties in
The Face in the Frost and Johnny Dixon also has a run in with a similar
manuscript in The Wrath of the Grinning Ghost.
Anyway – someone’s attempted to identify some of the herbal scenes from the book and…well…we’ll let Nick Pelling’s Voynich News tell the tale:
Anyway – someone’s attempted to identify some of the herbal scenes from the book and…well…we’ll let Nick Pelling’s Voynich News tell the tale:
"Elias Schwerdtfeger has blogged some speculations on the plant on f3r - essentially that, based on its lack of flowers and various other features, the plant depicted on f3r appears to be some kind of "Nacktsamen" (which I think is German for Gymnospermae, the plant group which includes conifers [fir, spruce, etc], cycads [the sago palm and others], and ginkgo biloba [a plant all on its own]). As normal with the VMs, this is good observation and inference, marred (as he indeed notes) only by the problem that no such plant actually exists."
Strangely enough, I ran across a book about this just before the new year:
ReplyDeletehttp://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&EAN=9780767914727&itm=5
The title of the book even mentions Bacon, which makes me wonder if Bellairs was inspired by the Voynch book?