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Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the Voynich Manuscript, the world's most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome. The book's language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful. For the first time, this facsimile, complete with elaborate folding sections, allows readers to explore this enigma in all its stunning detail, from its one-of-a-kind Voynichese text to its illustrations of otherworldly plants, unfamiliar constellations, and naked women swimming though fantastical tubes and green baths. The essays that accompany the manuscript explain what we have learned about this work from alchemical, cryptographic, forensic, and historical perspectives but they provide few definitive answers. Instead, as New York Times best-selling author Deborah Harkness says in her introduction, the book invites the reader to join us at the heart of the mystery.

Seven animal hide scrolls with Hebrew and Aramaic writing were sold in Jerusalem in 1947. Additional smaller fragments of similar scrolls were sold from 1948 to 1950. Within a few years of their appearance, these “Jerusalem Scrolls” as they were then known, became “the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran Cave 1.” While this change of names may seem trivial, it glosses over some difficult questions about the provenance of these materials. What we now call “Cave 1Q” or “Qumran Cave 1” was excavated in 1949, but scholarship reveals considerable confusion concerning which purchased scrolls can be materially connected to fragments that were excavated by archaeologists under controlled conditions in Cave 1. Furthermore, Cave 1 is often treated as if it was a sealed context rather than the highly contaminated site that it actually was at the time of its excavation by archaeologists. For these reasons, it is not completely clear whether all the scrolls usually assigned to Cave 1 actually originated at this site. This article is an attempt to sort through the evidence to determine exactly which scrolls and fragments attributed to Cave 1 were purchased, when and from whom such pieces were purchased, and what can actually be known with confidence about the connection of these “Jerusalem Scrolls” with the site we now call Qumran Cave 1.

The 'shadow line' is a term Royle uses to describe the faint line on the top edge of the text block that allows him to see whether a book on a shelf contains an inclusion - those items inserted into books and long forgotten.

Die Reihe Praxiswissen bietet Praktikern in Bibliotheken, Archiven und verwandten Informationseinrichtungen Antworten auf Fragen, die sich aus der täglichen Arbeit ergeben. Aktuelle Beispiele und Lösungsansätze werden von ausgewiesenen Fachleuten vorgestellt. Die enthaltenen Arbeitsmittel wie Checklisten, konkrete Textvorschläge, z. B. für Briefe oder Webseiten, Fragebögen usw. machen die Bände zu unentbehrlichen Arbeitsmitteln für Praktiker.

\"A young woman picks up a book left behind by a stranger. Inside it are his margin notes, which reveal a reader entranced by the story and by its mysterious author. She responds with notes of her own, leaving the book for the stranger, and so begins an unlikely conversation that plunges them both into the unknown. The book: Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey. The writer: Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world's greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him. The readers: Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they're willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.\"--Slipcase.

In the last two centuries, since the dawn of modern geology, heavy minerals have been used to investigate sediment provenance and for many other scientific or practical applications. Not always, however, with the correct approach. Difficulties are diverse, not just technical and related to the identification of tiny grains, but also procedural and conceptual. Even the definition of “heavy minerals” is elusive, and possibly impossible. Sampling is critical. In many environments (e.g., beaches), both absolute and relative heavy mineral abundances invariably increase or decrease locally to different degrees owing to hydraulic-sorting processes, so that samples close to \"neutral composition\" are hard to obtain. Several widely shared opinions are misleading. Choosing a narrow size-window for analysis leads to increased bias, not to increased accuracy or precision. Only point-counting provides real volume percentages, whereas grain-counting distorts results in favor of smaller minerals. This paper also briefly reviews the heavy mineral associations typically found in diverse plate-tectonic settings. A mineralogical assemblage, however, only reproduces the mineralogy of source rocks, which does not correlate univocally with the geodynamic setting in which those source rocks were formed and assembled. Moreover, it is affected by environmental bias, and by diagenetic bias on top in the case of ancient sandstones. One fruitful way to extract information on both provenance and sedimentological processes is to look for anomalies in mineralogical–textural relationships (e.g., denser minerals bigger than lower-density minerals; harder minerals better rounded than softer minerals; less durable minerals increasing with stratal age and stratigraphic depth). To minimize mistakes, it is necessary to invariably combine heavy mineral investigations with the petrographic analysis of bulk sand. Analysis of thin sections allows us to see also those source rocks that do not shed significant amounts of heavy minerals, such as limestone or granite, and helps us to assess heavy mineral concentration, the “outer” message carrying the key to decipher the “inner message” contained in the heavy mineral suite. The task becomes thorny indeed when dealing with samples with strong diagenetic overprint, which is, unfortunately, the case of most ancient sandstones. Diagenesis is the Moloch that devours all grains that are not chemically resistant, leaving a meager residue difficult or even impossible to interpret when diagenetic effects accumulate through multiple sedimentary cycles. We have conceived this friendly little handbook to help the student facing these problems, hoping that it may serve the purpose.

The variety of perspectives and methodologies (bibliographical, archival, typographical, provenance research) used by their authors, as well as the vastness of the contexts they refer to, clearly show that the early modern book is a fascinating and complex cultural phenomenon. The second paper concerns liturgical books produced in the first half of the 17th century by the Piotrkowczyk family printing house in Kraków. The considerations presented lead to the conclusion that the Statute's printer was not only able to correctly interpret the complex structure of the text and reinforce it by means of typography, but also to combine graphic and ornamental elements in such a way as to achieve a certain persuasive effect.

The potential of heavy minerals studies in provenance analysis can be enhanced conspicuously by using a state-of-the-art protocol for sample preparation in the laboratory, which represents the first fundamental step of any geological research. The classical method of gravimetric separation is based on the properties of detrital minerals, principally their grain size and density, and its efficiency depends on the procedure followed and on the technical skills of the operator. Heavy-mineral studies in the past have been traditionally focused on the sand fraction, generally choosing a narrow grain-size window for analysis, an approach that is bound to introduce a serious bias by neglecting a large, and sometimes very large, part of the heavy-mineral spectrum present in the sample. In order to minimize bias, not only the largest possible size range in each sample should be considered, but also, the same quantitative analytical methods should be applied to the largest possible grain-size range occurring in the sediment system down to 5 μm or less, thus including suspended load in rivers, loess deposits, and shallow to deep-marine muds. Wherever the bulk sample cannot be used for practical reasons, we need to routinely analyze the medium silt to medium sand range (15–500 μm) for sand and the fine silt to sand range (5–63 or > 63 μm) for silt. This article is conceived as a practical handbook dedicated specifically to Master and PhD students at the beginning of their heavy-mineral apprenticeship, as to more expert operators from the industry and academy to help improving the quality of heavy-mineral separation for any possible field of application.

Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and drawings are fabulously expensive. Millions of people admire his work, but are those masterpieces all genuine? To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake ones, and the key question addressed in this book is what may happen to art experts when they publicly voice their opinions on a particular Van Gogh (or not). The story starts with art expert J.B. de la Faille who discovered to his own bewilderment that he had included dozens of fake Van Goghs in his 1928 catalogue raisonné. He wanted to set the record straight, but met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians and others, marking the beginning of a fierce clash of interests that had seized the art world for many decades of the twentieth century.

Polish cathedral and monastic archives preserve multiple precious handwritten sources of musical and liturgical contents originating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three such manuscripts have been the topic of research in this paper. The article’s problem is the provenance of the Pauline Gradual (PL-CZ III-913 olim R659) from 1596, owned by the Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit in the Jasna Góra Monastery (Luminous Mount) in Częstochowa, Poland. The authors have examined the provenance by comparing the book’s repertoire of alleluiatic verses of the commune sanctorum with the contents of two older Polish codices from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, kept in the Archives and Library of the Cracow Cathedral Chapter: Wawel Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 45) and Jan Olbracht Gradual (PL-Kk Ms. 44). The research leads to an ascertainment that the Pauline codex has, to some extent, been modelled on the Cracow manuscripts. The main text has been accompanied by photographs of each source’s selected original folios, and by transcriptions of the alleluiatic chants analysed.