There’s only one reason why I occasionally wish I lived in New York and not Chicago, and that’s the ability to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s fantastic medieval manuscript exhibitions, which, at least from my vantage point, seem to happen rather often. The most recent one is called Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the…

Above is a funny comic from last week from XKCD concerning the Voynich Manuscript, which is, in fact, a real object. When I was doing some research at the Beinecke Library at Yale, it was one of the manuscripts that I most wanted to get my hands on. Unfortunately, when I arrived, someone else apparently…