On the character of Wilfrid Voynich

[ReneZ]

Here's a bit of trivia that I ran into today. I add it here for lack of a better place.

End-1921 - beginning 1922, Wilfrid approached the rather famous classicist and archeologist Francis W. Kelsey of the University of Michigan. He offered him a 12th century greek biblical MS for sale. This was the only Greek MS that Wilfrid had obtained from the Jesuits, by St. John Chrysostom. He asked $ 3000 for this MS, but while Kelsey and two other professors were very interested in obtaining it, it was outside their budget.

So, Kelsey travelled to Detroit, with the MS, to plead with management, and he succeeded to obtain a $ 15,000 budget for this, and other manuscripts.

As there was an upcoming Sotheby auction of additional bibliocal manuscripts in London, they decided to let Voynich act as their agent in this auction, aided by Voynich's very capable London employee Herbert Garland.
They laid down a set of rules for price ranges within which they could bid, and in the end, Voynich and Garland managed to obtain 47 Greek manuscripts and one in Latin. This formed the nucleus of the Michigan New Testament MS collection.