The Voynich Manuscript: History's Most Baffling Book

In 1912, Wilfrid Voynich traveled to the Villa Mondragone near Frascati, Italy, where a Jesuit college was quietly selling manuscripts to cover its debts. He was a Polish-born antiquarian dealer based in London, and he knew old books. What he pulled from the lot that day stopped him cold. The codex measured 23.5 by 16.2 centimeters, bound in soft vellum, water-stained, and filled with 240 pages of dense flowing script in an alphabet he had never seen. The illustrations were stranger still: bulbous plants that matched no known species, naked figures bathing in green pools connected by pipe-like tubes, and circular astronomical diagrams crowded with tiny labeled stars. Not one word matched any language in the Western or Eastern canon. Voynich paid an undisclosed sum, carried the book back to London, and photographed every page. He mailed copies to professors at the University of Pennsylvania and scholars at the British Museum. Within 2 years, every expert returned the same verdict: unidentifiable. Voynich held the manuscript until his death in 1930. He never learned what it said. The book entered the Beinecke Library at Yale in 1969 under call number MS 408, still unread, still carrying only his name.