A collector's nightmare: "I have the only copy in the world." "What's it about?" " I have no idea."

From The Guardian, a mystery in a small package:

It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked.

Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale university’s Beinecke library, emerging only occasionally.

New clue to Voynich manuscript mystery

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But after a 10-year appeal for access, Siloe, a small publishing house in northern Spain has secured the right to clone the document – to the delight of its director.

“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe’s office is, a few streets from the city’s famed Gothic cathedral.

“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

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 Images and text from the Voynich manuscript. Photograph: Universal History Archive via Getty Images

Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich – so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.