The Voynich Manuscript: the book, a brief and a press kit

Today we're publishing our first full release on the Voynich Manuscript, the fifteenth-century book no one can read. It has three parts, each built from the research on this site and set out by the mystery's key questions.

What's in it

The book. Reading Without a Key, in a new edition, organised by the site's questions. Each part opens with the questions it bears on and where they stand, and the appendices list every finding, every answer with its standing, and the methods and datasets, each with its catalog key. The front matter and Part I are open to everyone; members can read and download the whole book.

The brief. Four pages: where the mystery stands in four statements, the evidence for each with charts, every published reading and the readings still standing. Free to download and reuse under CC BY 4.0.

The press kit. A press release, key facts, manuscript images in the public domain and charts under CC BY 4.0, each with its credit line.

What it says

Letter-for-letter ciphers of Latin, Italian, German, French and Czech can be ruled out as the source of the text. The same tests recover keys planted in control texts 98 to 100 per cent of the time.

The text follows rules of its own. Words that can end in -m or -in are written with -m far more often at the end of a line, as scribes shortened words to fit, and the first word of each herbal page appears on no other page, as a plant's name would.

None of this reads the manuscript. No proposed reading, including the project's own first attempt in March 2026, has produced a dictionary word on pages it was not built from. Every test, dataset and result is on the site, with its key, for anyone to rerun.

apollo. (2026, October 24). The Voynich Manuscript: the book, a brief and a press kit. Mysteries Department. https://mysteriesdept.com/news/2026/10/24/the-voynich-manuscript-book-brief-and-press-kit