The manuscript consists of quires. A quire is made of folded parchment. The quires consist of folios, with text or illustrations on both sides of the folio. The quires are numbered from 1 to 20, the folios from 1 to 116. Some of the fold-outs have unusual shapes. Depending on the way of counting, this gives a total of 240 pages. As there are gaps in the numbering, it seems likely that some pages were lost; the manuscript probably had at least 272 pages. The gaps were already there when Voynich bought the manuscript in 1912.