Missing folios

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In fact, book owners did lots of things to their books that most of us would never do.  They would write their own comments on the pages (as we would only do with relatively cheap university prints). Some books have more marginal writing than original text.

Indeed, our current view of old manuscripts as museum artifacts must be a couple centuries old at most.  Before that, the value of a manuscript seems to have been its contents.   So annotations only added to the value of the book...

Book dealers would cut out valuable illuminations to sell separately.

But could those missing pages have had exceptional illustrations?  If they were big fold-outs, like the nine-rosettes, maybe...

Essentially all libraries wrote on their books, and put their stamps on pages right accross the text.

And that is one reason I don't believe that Rudoph ever owned it.  Shouldn't his librarians have stamped it somewhere?

[The two cut out pages] could have been [removed] without rebinding. The missing bifolios would have been removed coinciding with rebindings.

The missing bifolios could have been cut out too, after which the stubs could be removed without undoing the binding.  Would that leave visible traces? (Like slack cords?)

One could even have removed the quire-central bifolios (  f59+f64, f60+f63, f61+f62, f91+f92, f97+f98, and f109+f110 ) without separating the folios by cutting slits in the binding fold under the binding cords.

The cut outs could also have been done by someone giving the book away, or selling it, in order to 'keep a part of it'. 
That would not apply to Rudolf or Barschius. Possibly Widemann, Tepenec, Marci. Others may have been involved too.

The problem with all those candidates is that a few pages of the manuscript would have been worthless and useless. 

I cannot imagine old and half-blind Marci wishing to keep pages of the book for himself.

Tepenec does not seem to be the type of person who would care for an encrypted manuscript with plants that, according to Baresch, no doctor could identify.  Not enough to keep a few pages.  

Anyway, he probably did not sell or give the book away before his death.  Had he done so, I would expect the new owner to cross out Jacobus's ex libris on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and add his own; like Jacobus himself did with the #4 book at the National Library.  Instead it seems that the ex-libris was imperfectly erased.  Maybe Baresch pilfered the book from Jacobus's  library after his death, or had previously borrowed the book and "forgot" to return it.

Maybe Raphael intercepted the book before Marci's secretary shipped it to Rome and removed some pages because of his second (first?) profession as cryptographer.

Just from the length of time, it seems more likely that those pages disappeared in the ~250 years while the book was in Rome, first at the Gregorian University and then at the Jesuit secret book trove. 

And, the more I think about it, the more I suspect of Wilfrid removing some pages because they would have instantly demolished his claim of a Bacon original.

All the best, --stolfi