The world's most mysterious book has been locked away in a vault at Yale University in the US for the past half-century, its worn pages accessible to few and its secrets decipherable to no one. Written in an unrecognisable language, the 15th-century Voynich manuscript has stumped the world's best cryptographers.Now, a small Spanish publishing house has secured the right to construct a facsimile. Siloe will produce 898 replicas of the manuscript, raising the possibility that one will fall into the hands of someone who will at last crack the code.Juan José García, the director of Siloe, said it was thrilling just to touch the manuscript, which will take 18 months to reproduce in exact detail.The copies will be sold for à7000-à8000 each, García said.Carbon-dating of the calf-skin vellum on which the manuscript is written has found that it was created between 1404 and 1438 and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.Some of the pages are missing, with about 240 remaining. The text is written from left to right, and most pages have illustrations or diagrams.The name comes from Wilfrid Voynich, the Polish book dealer who bought it in 1912 from a collection of books owned by Italian Jesuit priests who found themselves short of money.The volume was bought in 1961 by book dealer Hans P Kraus from a friend of Voynich, who'd inherited it. Unable to find a suitable buyer, Kraus donated it to Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969.The text is made up of 20 to 25 unique characters, arranged in mystifying order, and the pages are adorned with bizarre and colourful illustrations.The illustrations are used to divide the manuscript into six sections, each with a different style and subject matter. The impression is that the work deals with medieval medicine.The first section has drawings of plants, while the second has circular diagrams, with suns, moons and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology, but also containing partly nude female figures, each holding a star.The third section has dense text interspersed with figures, mostly small nude women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes.Some of the most brilliant British and US cryptographers have pored over all this in vain. William Friedman, who led the team that broke the Japanese "Purple" cipher in World War 2, spent four decades studying it before conceding defeat.Images of the manuscript are available online, and Yale is regularly bombarded with messages from people claiming to have cracked the code, none of which have proved legitimate.Raymond Clemens, curator of the Yale library, said there had been so many requests to consult the original that it was decided to allow the book to be reproduced. - ©The Telegraph..