As well as the text of the Iliad, Venetus A preserves several layers of annotations, glosses, and commentaries known as the "A scholia", and a summary of the early Greek Epic Cycle which is by far the most important source of information on those lost poems.

The A scholia, for which Venetus A is by far the most important source, derive from the so-called "VMK" (Viermännerkommentar, "four-man commentary"), named for the four ancient scholars Aristonicus, Didymus, Herodian, and Nicanor.

Eustathius in his own commentary on the Iliad frequently refers to "Apion and Herodorus" as a source, and a comparison between them shows that the relationship between "ApH" and the A scholia is a close one.

Another important source that feeds into A is a group of scholia on mythographical and allegorical topics, derived from Porphyry's Homeric Questions.

[2] More recently, however, it has been pointed out that the Venetus A and B manuscripts list multiple authors as their sources, not just Aristarchus, and Aurispa would be unlikely to have ignored this distinction.

Bessarion collected over a thousand books in the fifteenth century, including the only complete text of Athenaios' Deipnosophistai; the autograph of Planudes' Greek Anthology; and Venetus A.

In reviewing Villoison's edition, Wolf realised that these scholia proved conclusively that the Homeric epics had been transmitted orally for an unknown length of time before appearing in writing.

Most recently, Amy Hackney Blackwell has a brief article in Wired[6] on the just-concluded month-long effort to digitize Venetus A at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (May 2007).