The Voynich Ninja

(12-11-2025, 01:39 PM)nablator Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Much better evidence: look at the clothes.  

But if he was left-handed, why wouldn't he have his coat made with buttons on the other side?

Actually I should retract my "good" from the evidence, since the book (like the clothes) were his, and he could have inserted a mirrored page in that book just so that it would look correct in the mirrored photo.  He must have known that people distrust left-handed antiquarians more than right-handed ones. 

All the best, --stolfi

Quote:We don't need to rely on that statement only.  He did that all the time, didn't he?  Even with the Jesuits.  Offer a very small price for books that he hoped to sell for many thousands of dollars.

There is a strong suspicion that Voynich was laundering money. at least at some moment of his life. He was a revolutionary who could have access to illegal money. So he could actually pay more for his books than he claimed. Or he could use illegal money to buy his books.

From Polish Wikipedia:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Quote:In 1898, he founded an antique shop in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., published luxury catalogues and, above all, offered hundreds of priceless You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and rare manuscripts that he had previously had to buy for astronomical sums. There is therefore a suspicion that this was a way to launder revolutionary money

The presumption that Wilfrid was Jewish appears in the FBI dossier as well. It all reeks of early 20th-century anti-semitic tropes...the Jew as money-grubbing, dishonest, physically "bent". We really need to be careful about how we interpret descriptions like that.

As I have said on numerous occasions, all bookdealers were cagey about provenance back then. It was standard practice. Nothing about Voynich's secretiveness or inventiveness surprises me in the least or makes me suspicious. It was how they all operated, although some were more guilty of it than others.

Today, that kind of imprecision would not be acceptable, as many collections (including Beinecke now) will not purchase a manuscript if it has any holes in its recent provenance. But back then, no one was really worried about it. That speaks to a collecting culture steeped in colonial practices and notions of American exceptionalism...if a manuscript was in the U.S., then that was all that mattered. No one was particularly interested in how it got there unless the story was mysterious and romantic (for example, finding a manuscript in an old castle in Europe, or asserting it was formerly owned by royalty, or claiming that it was a lost work by Roger Bacon).

Responding to various comments at once...

Voynich's bent shoulder(s), supposedly as a result from solitary confinement, are reported in various sources, and probably have one common origin. I will try to check what Sowerby writes. I have never seen that this affected his arms (left or right) in any way.
I also don't know for certain whether he was left- or right-handed and it seems not relevant, really.

The number of transaction details that 'would be nice to have' for his Jesuit deal are unrealistic. This just does not exist for any other deal. Given that the deal was a secret, this would not have been kept either.

The risks from this sale were not primarily with Voynich, but with the Jesuits, and consequently with the Vatican. The Jesuits stood to lose their other books, which were not for sale, and the Vatican, more than just losing 50,000 Lire, had their reputation at stake. An internal letter of the Vatican library says:

Quote:I allow myself to note that the most rigorous silence shall be
necessary also after the delivery (which will need to be made with great caution ), as the
provenience of the volumes must remain unknown , even in our library, to avoid possible
protests against the holy see.

 
This was written by the main librarian, who was a Jesuit and was able to visit the Villa that held the hidden Jesuit library.

Voynich's only risk was that he bought the books in Italy and was forbidden by law to export them without specific permission. He was warned about this by Strickland. This is all documented at my web site (letters from Strickland) and in the academia 'paper' I linked.

This neatly explained why he claimed that he got the books in Austria. Only, that later caused him problems with the FBI during WW1, which is most probably why he changed his story from Austria to 'a castle in Southern Europe' - pretty vague.

(14-11-2025, 10:52 AM)ReneZ Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.whether he was left- or right-handed [...] seems not relevant, really.

I agree.  This came up only because it was argued that he could not have forged the VMS or the letter because of the alleged disability on his right arm.

As for why he lied about the provenance of those books, those reasons you propose are quite plausible and sufficient.  But the why is mostly irrelevant to the BST (or the MFT).  The point is only that he had no scruples about lying about his sources.  

And now, it seems, also not about violating the Italian law, and acquiring Church property that the Church would probably not want to sell...

All the best, --stolfi

Or we could say he was a man of his word as far as book deals went.
It depends which way you hope to push it

(14-11-2025, 12:03 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Or we could say he was a man of his word as far as book deals went.
It depends which way you hope to push it

This was exactly what I was thinking. He was involved in the rare book trade ca. 1900. Which standard should we compare him to exactly to judge his moral character? What kind of insane idealized picture is required to have someone in his position not take the deal? The fact that he as a businessman went forward with this deal and upheld his part of the bargain has no relevance whatsoever to the likelihood that he would knowingly falsify his own stock with DIY projects. If anything, his deal with the Jesuits shows that he wanted to take some risks to obtain real old books to sell.

And even if he sold one, two or a hundred manuscripts that turned out to be (apparently convincing enough) fakes by someone else, that still does not teach us anything about whether or not he would forge a manuscript himself. 

All we see is him buying genuine wares [or ones he is made to believe to be genuine] and selling those.

(14-11-2025, 03:08 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.He was involved in the rare book trade ca. 1900. Which standard should we compare him to exactly to judge his moral character?

Hm, I don't think antiquarians have change much since then.  Look at recent cases of fraud. 

Typically an antiquarian will not engage in forgery himself, personally or by hire.  And he may not sell items that he know for sure that are forged.  Because he could go to jail for that.

But I think many would not refrain to sell an item that they only suspect to be a forgery, if they are not involved in the forgery themselves and thus would not face any consequences for that.

Voynich may have honestly believed that the VMS was Bacon's at first.  But he was soon told by all experts that it could not possibly be.  Yet he continued to try to prove (or "prove") that it was Bacon's for many years.  Was he being honest then?

Again, I do not think that he would (or could) have forged the VMS or Marci's letter. For the reason above.  But would he try convince some rich banker that it was Bacon's, even if he himself did not believe it?  I think he would. I don't see that as being less ethical than what he routinely did when buying books.

Would he dare switch BookA for MS408, or attach Marci's letter (if he got it loose), to MS408? That would already be jail territory; but I think he would, if he thought that he could hide that fact.  Or if he thought that, if needed, he could deny that he did it himself and blame it on some Jesuit librarian.  Or claim that the letter had become detached from BookA and he attached it to MS408 by honest mistake...

And that is nit incompatible with the fact that most of his sales were legit books, of course.

I recommend looking up the recent evaluation of the Moses Shapira case.   He was a Jew converted to Christian who owned an antiquities shop in Jerusalem, in the 1800s.  One day (he claimed) a Bedouin came to his shop offering a piece of parchment with ancient Hebrew writing, that he would have found in a cave across the Jordan from modern Israel, in the land of the ancient kingdom of Moab. The text was the final speech of (Biblical) Moses.  Shapira spent a lot of time and money trying to convince the world that it was genuine.  Ultimately the specialists of the time declared it a forgery, based on the shape of the vellum (which may have been cut from the bottom of a Torah scroll), the writing (which was different from what they believed would have been used centuries BCE), and from the text (which deviated from the Masoretic one in many points). But that conclusion surely was helped a lot by the fact that Shapira was known to sell fake "Moabite antiquities" to gullible tourists in his shop.   The manuscript was therefore ignored by scholars and disappeared after Shapira's death; all we have now are modern (1800ish) copies. 

But then in the 1940s the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, in caves on the Israeli side of the river but not far from that first cave; and -- surprise -- all the anomalies that had led to the dismissal of Shapira's scroll were found in them too...

All the best, --stolfi

(14-11-2025, 11:44 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And now, it seems, also not about violating the Italian law, and acquiring Church property that the Church would probably not want to sell...

I am not sure where he acquired church property that the church did not want to sell.

(14-11-2025, 06:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Voynich may have honestly believed that the VMS was Bacon's at first.  But he was soon told by all experts that it could not possibly be. 

He never had any pushback like that. Quite the contrary, there were scholars supporting the Bacon
authorship, Newbold was on his way to prove it from the text, and Prof. James Westfall Thompson was on his way to find a trace of an encrypted genuine Bacon manuscript as late as 1926.

Manley, who was quite suspicious of the Bacon origin, waited until after Voynich's death to publish his devastating paper.