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The book nobody knows how to read

It’s a mystery reminiscent of “The Da Vinci Code”: a fabled manuscript nobody can read, in a language which doesn’t appear to exist.

It’s either an unbreakable code or an ingenious hoax. Or it might just be a list of herbal recipes.

Some think the Voynich Manuscript, named after the second-hand book and antiques dealer thought to have discovered it in Italy in 1917, holds the secrets to eternal life.

Others just reckon it’s an elaborate medieval joke.

Either way, it has puzzled the world’s great cryptologists with codes seemingly nobody can unlock.

And the pictures it contains — elegantly detailed drawings of plants and animals not seen on the planet, naked women and some jellyfish-like creature — add to the intrigue.

But now an agreement for it to be reproduced after a 10-year battle for access to the sole copy locked away in a vault at Yale University’s Beinecke Library may see it finally fall into the hands of someone who can tell us what the hell it says.

The Voynich Manuscript is slightly bigger than a paperback, has 240 pages and is written in brown ink, punctuated by the rich, wild illustrations. Carbon dating has found it was created between 1404 and 1438.

Siloe is the small publishing house in Spain which has won the right to clone it.

The cloning process has some intriguing traditions of its own.

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Siloe, which specializes in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich.

The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones — a number which is a palindrome, or a figure that reads the same backwards and forwards — after the success of their first facsimile, of which they made 696 copies … another palindrome.

The director of Siloe, Juan Jose Garcia, is delighted to have the chance to painstakingly reproduce the book. “Touching the Voynich is an experience,” he said.

“It has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time … it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

Siloe will sell the facsimiles for 7,000 to 8,000 euros (about $10,400 to $11,800) each, and already almost 300 pre-orders have poured in.

But first the painstaking process of cloning it must be completed, with the look and feel of the document as important as the written words it contains.

It will take Siloe around 18 months to make the first facsimiles. Siloe staff are making mockups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real deal.

The paper they use — made from a paste developed by the company — has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.

Once printed, the pages will be “aged” and every stain, hole and sewn-up tear in the parchment reproduced.

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Garcia calls it “the Voynich challenge.”

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“My business partner says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery,” he said.

Theories abound about who wrote the Voynich Manuscript and what it means.

The text is made up of 20 to 25 characters, arranged in confounding order. Experts find the pictures just as puzzling.

For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th-century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (whose fascination with alchemy and magic landed him in jail), but carbon dating refuted that.

Others suggest it was written by a young Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote in code to escape the Spanish Inquisition. There’s even a suggestion an alien left the book behind. The most plausible is it’s a medicine book or book of medieval magic potions.

The world’s top codebreakers — including William Friedman, who helped break Japan’s “Purple” cipher during World War II — have made no breakthroughs.

Despite that, the Yale library gets thousands of emails each month from people claiming they’ve decoded it.

But the only person to have made any headway is fictional action hero Indiana Jones. In the Mac McCoy-authored book “Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone,” the fictitious archaeologist managed to crack it and use it as a map.