Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

It's a book that refuses to be read, a puzzle that has defeated the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st centuries, and a physical object that seems to have dropped out of an alternate dimension.

It's currently housed in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, cataloged as MS 408, where it remains as silent today as it was when it was rediscovered over a century ago.

Before diving into the mysteries of its text, we must first look at the physical object.

Carbon dating conducted at the University of Arizona in 2009 determined with 95% confidence that the vellum or calfskin pages were created between 1404 and 1438.

This week's podcast is coming from New Haven, which has consistently been in the nation's top ten towns to visit for its wealth of cultural activities, its walkability and all kinds of epicurean delights, not just pizza and hamburgers.

I love living here for the sheer richness of things to do, such as visiting exhibitions at the Yale Art Gallery and the Yale Centre for British Art, going to a concert in Sprague or Wolsey Hall, taking the grandchildren to the Peabody Museum or Beinecke Library, and closing the perfect day with an evening at the Yale Rep.

And I've lived and worked in New Haven for 45 years, and I likewise love its small-town feel, but its big aspirations.

As a Connecticut native from rural Mansfield Center, I enjoyed living in the city and being able to walk to movies and restaurants, theaters, concerts, school, and the Long Island Sound beaches.

Because the images in his book, Heimer Kuhnroth's images in his books don't go in the same order.

There was two of them at Beinecke Library.

I read online that supposedly the thing is that they wonder if you have to put the emblems in the right order because supposedly the books aren't the same.

Beinecke Library had two of them, so I was able to photograph both of them side by side in the same picture and prove, yes, they actually don't go in the same order.

They are different in these books.

And they have questioned, which would really suck in these 50 emblems if you actually got to rearrange them too.

It's a book that refuses to be read, a puzzle that has defeated the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st centuries, and a physical object that seems to have dropped out of an alternate dimension.

It's currently housed in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, cataloged as MS 408, where it remains as silent today as it was when it was rediscovered over a century ago.

Before diving into the mysteries of its text, we must first look at the physical object.

Carbon dating conducted at the University of Arizona in 2009 determined with 95% confidence that the vellum or calfskin pages were created between 1404 and 1438.

So as a biographer, I wanted to trace his creative process.

All right, so the first day I go to Beinecke, I say, oh, my God, I want to do a proposal on Gary.

And I'm a Yaley.

I graduated about 10 years after Gary.

Hey kids, welcome to The Vault.

Welcome to The Vault, located within the Beinecke Library at Yale, where we're looking for The Voynich Manuscript, first aired December 13th, 2018.

Enjoy.

All right, Jeff, what brings us back to New Haven, Connecticut? More New Haven pizza, I hope?

After Voynich died in 1930, the book passes into various hands until 1961 when it made it into the possession of Austrian book dealer Hans P. Kraus.

Kraus purchased the Voynich manuscript for $24,500, and for years he tried to sell it, but he couldn't fetch the price he wanted.

So in 1969, he donates the book to the Beinecke Library here at Yale University in New Haven, and it's been puzzling scholars in their rare book collection ever since.

All right, I'm dumbfounded that with today's technology, no one has been able to crack this code or translate this language.