Wilfrid Michael Voynich

Wilfrid Voynich Michael (White Russian Міхаіл Войніч Michaił VOJNIC; born October 31, 1865 in Hrodna, Belarus, as Michał Habdank - Wojnicz, † March 19, 1930 in New York) was an American book collector and antiquarian Polish descent. He is best known for the discovery of named after him Voynich manuscript.

Life

Voynich initially studied chemistry in Moscow, where he passed the exam and received a license to practice as a pharmacist. As a result Voynich was a member of the Polish national movement, which fought for the liberation of Russian oppression. Because of his involvement in a rescue attempt of two sentenced to death comrades, he was imprisoned in 1885 in Warsaw. Without being sentenced, he spent two years in solitary confinement. As a result of harsh prison conditions remained an inclined shoulder and a general weakening of the constitution. On Easter Sunday, 1887 it was the view from a cell window on a standing at the foot of the citadel black-clad young woman. It was his future wife Ethel Boole, daughter of the famous English mathematician George Boole and inflamed by the ideals of anti-tsarist freedom movement young musician.

Shortly after Voynich was exiled to Irkutsk in Siberia. After two failed attempts, he managed to escape. In a five-month odyssey he finally arrived in October 1890 to London, where Ethel Boole was one of the stated by the friends in the Russian liberation movement contact addresses.

The late 1890s Voynich opened a used bookstore in London (the first book was published in 1898 ). He quickly acquired a reputation for being able to acquire the most remote works themselves, and opened in the following years, offices in Paris, Florence and Warsaw. After his bookseller was initially located on Shaftesbury Avenue, he eventually had offices at Piccadilly. Whether the business success was based solely on Voynichs antiquarian gifts, however, is doubtful. A hidden feature of the Antiquarian was the distribution of revolutionary literature and raising funds for the Russian struggle for freedom. The Antiquarian could thus have been a kind of money wash Russian and Polish freedom fighters.

In 1902 he married Ethel Lilian Boole, with whom he lived together since the mid-1890s.

In November 1914, the Voynich traveled with the Lusitania in the U.S. to set up a used bookstore in New York, where he permanently settled in 1915. His wife followed him a few years later, but no longer living with him.

Previously, in 1912, he managed a book Fund, which would occupy him for the rest of his life and with which his name is now associated primarily: At the Villa Mondragone, the Jesuit college in Frascati, he discovered in a puzzling Redacted font, richly illustrated manuscript, known as the " Voynich manuscript " today. The mysterious manuscript resists until now all attempts to decipher its contents, and has spawned a myriad of controversial theories. One of these theories is that the manuscript is a forgery of Voynichs hand. For details on the manuscript and its history can be found at Voynich manuscript.

Towards the end of the 1920s worsened both Voynichs business situation as well as his health. In 1929 he fell ill during a stay in England of pneumonia, from which he did not recover. After his return to the United States Voynich died on 19 March 1930.