"Codice Voynich", by Claudio Foti…

There’s a new book just out, self-published through lulu.com, called “Codice Voynich” by Claudio Foti. It’s 143 pages long, 6″ x 9″, and in Italian – though fewer pages, it has the same dimensions as the VMs and, who knows, perhaps even the same language. 😉

But printing is basically easy now: and so the big issue for publishers and self-publishers is sales and marketing – getting people to buy your wares. Yet for print-on-demand business wrappers like Lulu, the economics are somewhat suspect: unless you’ve got absolutely killer content that large numbers of people need right now and can be compressed into a tiny number of pages (like, say, “Getting Laid with Facebook“), who is going to pay £13.15 for a softback? Yeah, Voynich completists like me, sure: but are there really more than 20-30 of those in the world?

For my own Voynich book, I worked out that for digital printing to make good economic sense, it could sensibly have no more than 240 pages, and I could charge no more than £9.95 per copy, no matter what I actually put inside it. And so I’ll be very interested to see what makes Claudio’s book worth more for 90+ less pages.

Incidentally, typical keywords Claudio has flagged are: magic alchemy Prague Rome medieval Middle Ages manuscript codex Atlantis Bacon Kelley mysterious rune Lovecraft Necronomicon Nostradamus Dee Voynich. No huge surprises there: which itself is a bit of a shame. If it had been “Voynich Facebook Smurf Cheeseboard Helicopter“, well…