Missing folios

[LisaFaginDavis]

The missing leaves comprise six bifolia plus two single leaves: four bifolia were removed from the centers of quire 8 (three bifolia, folios 59-64) and quire 20 (one bifolium, folios 109-110), two of the bifolia were singulion quires (quires 16 and 18, that is, folios 91|92 and 97|98), and two single leaves were cut out leaving stubs behind (folios 12 and 74). All of these were removed AFTER the seventeenth-century foliation was added and BEFORE Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1911/12, but there is no way to know precisely when the leaves were removed or by whom. There is also no way to know if any leaves had already gone missing by the time the foliation was added. 

The sequence of events goes like this:

1) Quire numbers were added and the manuscript was (mis)bound sometime in the fifteenth century;
2) Folio numbers were added in the seventeenth century;
3) six bifolia and two single leaves were removed before Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1911/12. 

In addition, there is no way to know if the missing leaves were all removed at the same time by the same person, or by different people at different times. I suspect that folios 12 and 74 were cut out first, perhaps sent to Prague to Rome, since cutting out those single leaves is a very different codicological process than removing bifolia from the center of a quire, although that is pure conjecture.