My copies of Eileen Reeves “Galileo’s Glassworks” and Matt Rubinstein’s “Vellum” have both arrived in the post: and so the inevitable book triage process sets in, whereby I work out which of the books I’m currently reading to put to one side to make time/space for the new arrivals.

Unfortunately, I’m so utterly captivated by Lynn Thorndike’s “History of Magic & Experimental Science” Vol III (covering the 14th century), I’ll probably have to finish that one first. Only a few hundred pages to go, then…

A Latin aside: I’ve been programming with a code library from 3Dlabs with a function that normally appears as “des.init()”. However, desinit is a proper Latin word meaning “it ceases”, and refers (as anyone who has read Thorndike will know) to the words at the end of manuscripts, just as incipit refers to the words at their start. What I didn’t know until this week was that there is also a nice saying from Horace desinit in piscem (or in full “desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne“), which refers to a statue that starts beautiful at the top but ends up as a ugly fish at the bottom (it even gets quoted in Asterix and the Secret Weapon) – a handy metaphor for things which seem to start out well but end up badly. Nothing at all to do with 3Dlabs, then.

On the subject of books, I recently found a reference on WorldCat to a a real (ie non-fiction) Voynich book I’d never heard of, written by VMs mailing list member Jim Comegys in 2001, and with the catchy title “Keys for the voynich scholar : necessary clues for the decipherment and reading of the world’s most mysterious manuscript which is a medical text in Nahuatl attributable to Francisco Hernández and his Aztec Ticiti collaborators.” I’ll see if I can get a copy from Jim (though I suspect he may not have properly published it per se).

Another Voynich-inspired (I’m yet sure whether or not “Voynich-themed” might be putting it a bit strongly) novel to add to the ever-fattening Big Fat List. Australian writer Matt Rubinstein‘s novel was called “A Little Rain on Thursday” (the picture is from f75r) when it was published last June in Oz by Text Publishing: it appeared here last July (published by Quercus) under the title “Vellum“. Amazon Marketplace has copies for £1.98 + £2.75 UK p&p: I’ve ordered one & will post a review here ASAP. It doesn’t appear to have any evil Jesuit priests in it, which has to be A Very Good Thing Indeed.

What’s sort of appealing (well – to me, at least) is the way he casually slips the words “marginalia” and “forensic” into the cover blurb. However, this may well be a weakness, given that to keep him fed and watered in writerland, his book has to sell to a large number of non-Voynicheros, to whom such things are usually fairly alien (even if they do watch CSI).

Oh, and the stuff in the story about the manuscript decipherer being obsessive may also have alienated him from passing VMs-ologists. We’re not obsessive, I tell you: we count the number of stars on each section of each page for scientific reasons, damnit! Errrrrrrrrrm…

…maybe he’s got a point. Oh well… :-((((