Would a NEW Voynich Manuscript be valuable?

[Bluetoes101]

Also on the entertainment bus, I would agree with Jorge on the selling point maybe being "from far away". 

But on the main question. I think so. Even though it is "poor" on the poor to excellent scale in many respects, it is still a book with 150ish(?) pages of paintings/drawings. I doubt many people would have seen many books full of paintings/drawings they could afford to purchase, never mind to the extent of the VMS. It's not a commissioned book by royalty level of workmanship for sure, but it is very grand in its amount of images. Plus we find it very wonderous even now, I can only imagine it would be then also.

While it may have been labelled as "uselessly taking up space", we should probably include the whole part,

"Now since there was in my library, uselessly taking up space, a certain riddle of the Sphinx, a piece of writing in unknown characters, I thought it would not be out of place to send the puzzle to the Oedipus of Egypt to be solved. And so I ordered a certain old book to be transcribed in part, with the writing closely imitated (the bearer of this letter will inform you that he saw it with his own eyes). A year and a half ago I sent that writing to your Reverence. My hope was that (if your Reverence should see fit to assign some working time to investigating it and correlating those characters of unknown devising with known letters) the effort might (to the extent that the matters concealed in the book proved to be worthy of such first class work) benefit its Oedipus, and myself, and the common good.

It did not seem advisable to commit the book itself to a journey so long and full of perils. I could only suppose from the fact that I have had no word of the matter after all this time that the previous consignment did not reach Rome. I had therefore just decided to repeat the exercise when the above Father Moretus informed me to my great pleasure that it had ended up in the City. It would be an even greater pleasure if the said book could be opened by your Reverence’s aid, and make all men of quality co-owners of whatever good it contains.

From the pictures of herbs, of which there are a great many in the codex, and of varied images, stars and other things bearing the appearance of chemical symbolism, it is my guess that the whole thing is medical, the most beneficial branch of learning for the human race apart from the salvation of souls. This task is not beneath the dignity of a powerful intellect. After all, this thing cannot be for the masses as may be judged from the precautions the author took in order to keep the uneducated ignorant of it. In fact it is easily conceivable that some man of quality went to oriental parts in quest of true medicine (he would have grasped that popular medicine here in Europe is of little value). He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script. This is all the more plausible because the volume contains pictures of exotic plants which have escaped observation here in Germany."

To me, Barschius seems more "under the spell" of the wonder of the VMS like we, and presumably those before were. After all Marci says he (Barschius) toiled with it until his death. Can we set a date on when this level of interest would not be present in such a curious object?

[Edit: Lost half the quote from letter for some reason, pasted back in]