After five years of penal labor, his punishment for a failed attempt to rescue two Polish revolutionaries from the Warsaw Citadel, Wilfrid Voynich (born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz) escaped from a Siberian prison camp near Irkutsk. After five months of travel and dodging Russian police, Voynich made it to London, where the ex-pharmacist-turned-revolutionary continued his work against the Russian Tsar with the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. But after his co-conspirator’s untimely death in a freak train accident, the son of a Polish-Lithuanian noble family put down his arms to become—you guessed it!—a seller of antique books.
The life of Wilfrid Voynich was absolutely insane. Born in 1865 in present-day Lithuania, under what was then the Russian Empire, Voynich studied chemistry at Moscow University and graduated to become a pharmacist. But at the age of 20, living in Poland, Voynich joined the Polish socialist revolutionary organization Proletariat. Just one year later, his revolutionary fervor led him to attempt to break Piotr Bardowski and Stanisław Kunicki, other members of the Proletariat, out of the Warsaw Citadel, a historic Polish prison. The prison break did not go as planned, and Voynich was sentenced to hard labor in a middle-of-nowhere Russian village. In his time there, Voynich learned eighteen languages—so I guess it wasn’t all bad? You know the rest: he escaped, got to London, fought against the tsarist autocracy, retired, and became a collector and salesperson of antique books at the urging of Richard Garnett, a curator for the British Museum.
This guy just keeps getting weirder and weirder, and we haven’t even gotten to the FBI investigation on him yet!
Anyway, in 1898, Voynich opened a bookstore in Soho Square in London, and his unexplainably good luck led him to discover all manner of rare books. He was married, was naturalized as a British citizen, and was generally having a pretty good life. That was until 1912, when all the stored-up weirdness of the last, mostly normal decade came back to get him. Voynich was in Italy, visiting the Villa Mondragone, a sixteenth-century papal summer home from where the Gregorian calendar was first popularized. The villa had fallen on hard times, and to raise money the monks who worked there began secretly selling their antiques. Voynich bought thirty manuscripts at this sale, one of which would soon become world-famous! This two hundred and forty page book, now called the Voynich Manuscript, was made from fourteen full cow skins and is written in a completely unique and unintelligible language found nowhere else on Earth. The Voynich Manuscript is packed with botanical illustrations, cosmological charts, and notes on balneology (the strange study of using bathing to cure disease), but not a single word of the text has been deciphered, apart from one name written in invisible ink. This was obviously a big deal for Voynich, but for three years he kept the book mostly hidden before unveiling it to the public in 1915.
This was a very busy time for good old Wilfrid. He had recently opened a bookshop overseas in New York, where he relocated to at the start of World War 1. In 1917 he again upended his whole operation and moved to Piccadilly, in London, and it was in this establishment that the FBI caught up with him. Now Wilfrid hadn’t done anything wrong (that we know of, apart from those two eensy-weensy prison breaks), but the United States Bureau of Investigation had received two separate tips that he was a potential threat to national security, so they had to investigate. It may be relevant to note that the FBI technically didn’t exist yet. It was still acting as the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) at this point in Voynich’s life, and would only be rebranded, complete with a total merch overhaul, after his death.
But anyway, the BOI caught wind of a rumor circulating about Voynich that had started at a Chicago dinner party hosted by the Head Librarian of the Northwestern University Library, Walter Lichtenstein. Voynich, proud of his possession of a famous Bacon Cypher (it’s not what it sounds like), boasted that the copy he had was also being worked on by the US War Department. This cipher was of no importance to national security whatsoever, but a misunderstanding resulting from Voynich’s claim prompted the BOI to open an investigation on him on the premise that he was somehow in possession of an American War Department cipher, which would have been a major national security risk, especially during World War 1. The extensive investigations of the BOI and a civilian vigilante justice organization that secretly searched his offices amounted to nothing, however, because the crime he was accused of committing literally never happened.
In 1930, at the age of 64, Wilfrid Voynich died of lung cancer in a New York hospital, presumably surrounded by loved ones, antique books, Russian revolutionaries, his pharmacist classmates, and disguised government agents. We can only hope that Wilfrid Voynich passed peacefully, because if his restless ghost is out there, then it is sure that his shenanigans will continue.
