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On the character of Wilfrid Voynich
- On the character of Wilfrid Voynich
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RE: On the character of Wilfrid Voynich
Jorge_Stolfi > 5 hours ago
(5 hours ago)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 -
RE: On the character of Wilfrid Voynich
Rafal > 5 hours ago
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:
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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
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RE: On the character of Wilfrid Voynich
LisaFaginDavis > 4 hours ago
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).