/lit/ - Literature

Admit it, /lit/, you don't really understand pic related.

You may well think you do, but you most assuredly do not. Only those with the type of rarefied intelligence that would never happen upon a place such as this even begin to have a chance of grasping Waldo.

You're just not smart enough. Give up.

Strange obsessions with books that you're a bit embarrassed to admit

>pic related
This book and attempts to translate it have literally driven people insane in the past. It fascinates me to think that whoever wrote the book either created a fantastic cipher that has yet to be cracked and that it may be a long lost alchemical text or whether the author has effectively trolled the world

Anyone else have similar strange obsessions with certain books?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0066344

>>1530339
Oh, hell yes. This is my favorite suggestion so far.

The book was first proven to exist in a letter that an alchemist wrote to a scholastic friend, asking about hints as to the books origin and language. After the alchemist's death, the book traded owners numerous times, before ending up in the hands of a man with the surname Voynich, after which the text was named. After his death, the book was eventually donated to the historical library of Yale University where it remains today.

To this day, no one knows the books author, nor the language in which it is written. The language is very strange in the fact that it uses alphbetic characters that must appear in one form or another in every word (much like vowels in modern-day English), but also uses words that repeat twice, sometimes three times in succession, a trait commonly seen in the ancient Asian languages. Every single word and every single "letter" in the text has been recorded and meticulously studied, and still there is no pattern or indication as to what the language is, where its from, or what it means.

The idea that the book itself is a hoax has come up in debate, however most scholars regard this as extremely unlikely. The meticulous detail and the time it would have taken to create the book would be unlike any hoax of this kind. Also, the fact that no one in the books history of ownership ever tried to profit off of it, as well as the carbon dating method used, leads most scholars to believe it is completely genuine.