Quote:The points that have been presented in relation to the order of production of the MS may now be summarised.

• The MS was produced in a bifolio-per-bifolio manner, with the drawing outlines inked first, followed by the inking of the text;
  
• The quire numbers were added before the folio numbers;
  
• The page order has been disturbed, and this happened before both sets of numbers were added;
  
• The painting was done before the present binding;
  
• The quire and folio numbers were added before the present binding;
  
• Some of the painting appears to have been done after the folio numbers were added;
  
• Twelve of the fourteen missing folios were lost after the folio numbers were added, but before the present binding.
  

This leads to the following tentative reconstruction:

• All bifolios of the MS were prepared: the drawing outlines and the text were added in ink;
  
• Sometime after this, the planned order of the bifolios was disturbed. The bifolios were stacked anew in an incorrect order (implying that the person who did this was not the original author) but the set was still complete. (The interesting task of identifying the original page order has not been completed, and has mainly been driven by Nick Pelling);
  
• The quires were numbered first, the MS may have been bound, and the folios were numbered after that. (This initial binding is not necessary but would explain the inconsistency of the quire and folio numbers of quire 9);
  
• At this point, the book had all folios including the now missing ones, and was not painted, or only partially painted. Folio 42 would not have been painted yet;
  
• The MS was disassembled and painted (or the partial painting completed). Six bifolios were lost or removed at this point;
  
• Shortly after the painting, the MS was rebound in the same order, but with the six bifolios missing. Folios 12 and 74 would have still been there. Especially the blue paint transferred on opposite pages;
  
• Folios 12 and 74 were cut out sometime later
  

• There is a hidden semantic connection justifying to join together bifoliae like that, and the quirer understood the language (very unlikely, as Lisa Fagin Davis' work tends to suggest that quiring itself was a misunderstanding of the book, which should have stayed as a collection of loose leaves, or should have been quired as a thick pile of singulions)
  
• The missing bifoliae contain drawings and text bridging the gap (possible, but unhelpful)
  
• Q8 was from the start a patchwork quire, gathering everything that doesn't fit (this indicates that q16 and q18 were bigger than a sigular bifolio without foldouts each, as else they could have been joined into q8 and the resulting quire would still not have been thicker than q20, which by its existence, shows that quires this big are practical ; it doesn't explain, though, why it would have been numbered this low, rather than being put at the end)
  
• All quires were initially this big and we shouldn't read into 8's length (not really realistic, as it means 7 bifoliae are missing, one in each of the first 7 quires; the most probable outcome would have been to have unequal quires at the start)