Editor's Prescript To THE GRATE BOOK OF MOO

I came by this document, written on old parchment in a fine calligraphic hand, and signed in an illegible scrawl, in the back of an old book shop, sold as a package with a volume on the Copernican solar system. The signature I later took to a handwriting analyst, who determined it to be that of one "Egbert B. Gebstadter". After reading the document carefully several times, I returned with the book to the shop where I had bought it, and asked where the owner had obtained it. It seems that he had bought it off a certain translator named Gebstadter who, being hard up for money, had brought in a stack of books from his private collection, all of which were very antique. He was reluctant to part with them, but needed the cash. With some difficulty, I was able to track down this Gebstadter, and in exchange for the return of his book on Copernicus I was able to extract from him the information of whence came this mysterious parchment. It seems Gebstadter himself had translated the work about ten years earlier, and that he had obtained it from a friend named Marcus.
I sought out Marcus, who reported that he had found the document in the bottom of an ancient steamer trunk. This would have been the end of my trail, except that Marcus happened to have been curious about what such a document would be doing underneath the false bottom that concealed the inside of the trunk. Although Marcus himself could not translate the document, the original of which he showed me, Gebstadter had helped him, hence his curiosity. He had returned to his uncle, from whom he had obtained the trunk, and eventually dragged the secret out of him. Marcus' uncle had been visiting in Sweden some years previously, and hidden the document in his trunk to ensure its safety during the voyage. Marcus asked where his uncle had found the document, and discovered that it was sold to him by a fortune teller in Stockholm. She had obtained it in lieu of payment from a mysterious customer in a long dark coat, and having no use for it, sold it immediately to Marcus' uncle.
Fortunately, Marcus' uncle had had the good sense to demand to know what it was, and so had the fortune teller, who wasn't ready to accept anything short of cash without a good explanation. The mysterious customer had told the lady that it was a translation into Swedish of an ancient Atlantean manuscript known only as the "Voynich Manuscript". He told her that he had "liberated" it from the hands of the tightfisted Atlantis scholar who had translated it. The scholar himself had obtained it from a peddler in England, who had sold him many works of Atlantean art, and the occasional manuscript. The peddler, on pressure from the scholar, admitted to stealing it from the Temple of Atlantis, which survived in London, handing down the tradition of the Atlantean faith from "High Preest" to "High Preest". These Atlantis Templars professed as an article of faith, when the peddler joined under false pretenses in order to steal the Atlantean art, that they had had them since the fall of Atlantis, and a few surviving members rescued some of the island's more important and portable treasures in their boat. This particular manuscript, they elaborated, was a transcript of the original, taken during the fall of Atlantis from the palace of the Great King Norble-Goop the Seventh, who reigned during the Fourth Dynasty of the House of Norble, the final dynasty of Atlantis.
Investigating the Atlantis Templars, I discovered that King Norble had neither written nor found the manuscript himself, but that it had been in the Royal Archives for the past several thousand years before the final collapse of Atlantis. It was originally purchased by Queen Dorble-Sneep the Fifth, of the Seventh Dynasty of the Dorbles, from a travelling Flying Saucer pilot, and translated by the Alien Contact specialists of Atlantis. The pilot explained that he was an Intergalactic Merchant Broker, and that this document was of no use to him, having been purchased from a Time Travel Technician as a novelty item for his wife, just before learning that she'd filed for divorce. The Time Travel Technician, in turn, had picked it up as a sample from some time in the future, and translated it for study. After finding out what it was, he began selling the translated copies. It later turned out that the "some time in the future" happened to be some hundred thousand years after the Intergalactic Merchant Broker got it, and, after further study, I found that the exact dates given by the Atlantis Templars explained their horror at finding the manuscript stolen by the peddlar.
Apparently the Technician explained to the Intergalactic Merchant Broker that the present civilization on Earth (that is, Atlantis) would eventually collapse, and 10000 years would pass before civilzation emerged again, somewhere in Africa or possibly the Mediterranean (he wasn't quite sure), and a long time after that, this very book would appear somewhere in one of the major countries of the world. The Atlantean Templars assumed he meant THEIR copy of the book, which he would then return to his own time and translate into Galactic, since the given date for the theft was in 1998, known to be the year of the X-ist arrival on Earth. As it turns out, it is most likely to be this very manuscript. Guard yours carefully, and don't let any aliens steal it!
Okay. Enough of this shit.