Wilfrid Voynich

Michał Habdank-Wojnicz was born on 31 October 1865 in Telšiai, a town in what is now Lithuania but was then part of the Russian Empire. His family belonged to the Polish nobility, and the Habdank portion of his name came from a Polish heraldic clan. His father held a minor government post as a titular counsellor, placing the family in a modest but respectable social position.

He was educated at a gimnazjum in Suwałki, a town in northeastern Poland, before going on to university studies in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, and Moscow. He completed his degree at Moscow University in chemistry and qualified as a licensed pharmacist, training that gave him a formal scientific background well before he became known for his work with rare books.

In 1885, while in Warsaw, Wojnicz joined the revolutionary organization Proletariat, led by Ludwik Waryński. This group worked against the Russian imperial authorities who controlled Poland at the time. In 1886 he took part in a failed attempt to rescue two fellow conspirators, Piotr Bardowski and Stanisław Kunicki, who had been sentenced to death and held in the Warsaw Citadel. The rescue attempt failed, and Wojnicz was arrested by the Russian police.

In 1887 he was sentenced to penal servitude and sent to Tunka, a settlement near Irkutsk in Siberia. During his years in exile there, he taught himself the basics of eighteen different languages, though he never mastered any of them fully. This period of forced isolation, unusual as it seems, laid the groundwork for the linguistic curiosity that would later shape his career among rare manuscripts.

In June 1890, Wojnicz escaped from his Siberian exile. He made his way west by train, passing through Hamburg before arriving in London in October 1890. Once in England, he initially used the assumed name Ivan Kel'chevskii to protect his identity from Russian authorities still hunting escaped exiles.

In London he joined forces with Sergius Stepniak, another Russian revolutionary, working within the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, an organization opposed to tsarist rule. This continued until Stepniak's death in a railway crossing accident in 1895, after which Wojnicz stepped back from organized revolutionary work altogether.

Around 1897, on the advice of Richard Garnett, a curator at the British Museum, he turned to a new profession as an antiquarian bookseller. He opened a bookshop at Soho Square in London in 1898. He quickly built a reputation for finding rare and valuable books, most notably a Malermi Bible he acquired in Italy in 1902.

In 1902 he married Ethel Lilian Boole, herself a former revolutionary and the daughter of the British mathematician George Boole. The two had known each other since 1890, not long after his arrival in London. In 1904 he was formally naturalized as a British subject, at which point he adopted the legal name Wilfrid Michael Voynich, the name by which he became known for the rest of his life.

Voynich expanded his business by opening a second bookshop in New York in 1914. The outbreak of the First World War shifted the center of his working life increasingly toward the United States. During these years he wrote catalogues and other writings documenting the antiquarian book trade, building his standing as an expert in old and rare manuscripts.

In 1917 he relocated his London shop to a new address at 175 Piccadilly. That same year, rumors about a mysterious cipher in his possession drew the attention of the FBI, which opened an investigation into him. Agents noted that he handled manuscripts dating from the eleventh through thirteenth centuries and that his stock was valued at roughly half a million dollars at the time. The inquiry uncovered nothing beyond confirming that he owned a centuries-old coded document.

Voynich's lasting fame rests on a single acquisition: a strange illustrated manuscript he said he obtained in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone in Italy. He did not present it publicly until 1915. The manuscript, written in an unknown script accompanied by unusual illustrations, defied every attempt at decipherment during his lifetime and remains unread today. Carbon dating carried out long after his death showed the materials were produced sometime between 1404 and 1438.

Voynich kept possession of the manuscript for the rest of his life. He died in 1930 at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City from lung cancer, and the book that carries his name continues to be regarded as one of the most puzzling documents in the history of writing.