Folio numbers

[ReneZ]

Hi René. What do you mean by “the direction of some of the folds”? The folding directions of how foldouts were folded into quires?

Like this:

Indeed. The folds are either 'mountain' or 'valley' folds. A first complete list was made by Jim Reeds when he visited the Beinecke library in the 1990's. From this, it could be concluded that the folio numbers were written on the pages while they were completely folded in. Due to the various different folding methods of some of the foldouts, as a result the folio number occasionally appears on the verso side.

However, already at that time it appeared that there was one exception to this rule, which could be explained if the fold had changed direction over time.

When the Yale facsimile book was prepared, this was revisited in detail, leading to an illustration of the quire layout on page 24. I updated my page at voynich.nu to make it consistent, and it was clear that there was at least one more change.

I remember that, when looking at the scans, there is at least one 'double fold',  i.e. it could go either way.