13 Facts About Wilfrid Voynich

Wilfrid Voynich is remembered as the eponym of the Voynich manuscript.

Wilfrid Voynich was the son of a Polish petty official.

Wilfrid Voynich graduated from Moscow University in chemistry and became a licensed pharmacist.

Whilst in Siberia, Wilfrid Voynich acquired a working knowledge of eighteen different languages, albeit not well.

Wilfrid Voynich became an antiquarian bookseller from around 1897, acting on the advice of Richard Garnett, a curator at the British Museum.

Wilfrid Voynich opened a bookshop at Soho Square in London in 1898.

Wilfrid Voynich was remarkably lucky in finding rare books, including a Malermi Bible in Italy in 1902.

In 1902, he married a fellow former revolutionary, Ethel Lilian Boole, daughter of the British mathematician George Boole, with whom Wilfrid Voynich had been associated since 1890.

Wilfrid Voynich became deeply involved in the antiquarian book trade, and wrote a number of catalogues and other texts on the subject.

Wilfrid Voynich relocated his London bookshop to 175 Piccadilly in 1917.

Also in 1917, based on rumours, Wilfrid Voynich was investigated by the FBI, in relation to his possession of Bacon's cipher.

Wilfrid Voynich died at Roosevelt Hospital in New York, in 1930, of lung cancer.

The most famous of Wilfrid Voynich's possessions was a mysterious manuscript he said he acquired in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone in Italy, but first presented in public in 1915.