We Finally Know What the Voynich Manuscript Was.. The NSA Hid Its File for 50 Years

During the First World War federal investigators wrote up the owner of the Voynich manuscript as possibly a German. He had written to a professor that he couldn't say where he bought his manuscripts and the reason he gave was my promise given to the guardians of these manuscripts. For 400 years people have paid for that book without reading a line of it and every time it changed hands a piece of where it came from went missing. It just looks like you should be able to read it. And the more you look at it, the more you realize you can't make any sense out of it. He never said who the guardians were. Then agents searched his office. The suspicion had started with his own mouth. At a dinner in Evanston, outside Chicago, where Wilfrid Voynich, a bookseller from London, told the table he had the cipher of the American War Department in his possession. It ended up in a memo. He wasn't inventing the connection out of nothing either. Back in 1915, the War Department had written to him about the book, because it wanted its cryptogram experts to work on copies of the pages. In the summer of 1917, one of his letters reached an informant, and it went straight on to the investigators with a warning attached. If he has the run of the War Department's cipher or signals rooms, he will bear a close watch. The trail he was protecting most likely starts with an Emperor out shopping. Rudolf II had already paid 100 gulden for one book from Augsburg, and he liked it enough to go back for more. The big purchase came next – a lot of strange books from a doctor in Augsburg. The treasurer's account book enters it against the doctor's receipt, number 127, and ends the entry with PAID 600. What that one payment did to the doctor shows up in the city's tax registers. I also checked the tax registers in Augsburg, the city tax, and after Wiedemann sold the books for 600 florins to the emperor, he doubled his net worth. So this was like a real big deal for him. Straight afterwards, he sold the emperor three more books for 60. The strange books didn't go straight to Prague, though. They traveled in a small barrel, which was the normal way to ship books safely back then. And that barrel didn't get out of Augsburg. The court's own word for what happened to it is arrestiert, held. To get it released, the treasurer's man in Augsburg had to buy it free for another 24 gulden, and the emperor signed the money off as an official expense in a letter from Pilsen. The barrel did reach his court in the end. The doctor who'd sold them had been living in somebody else's house. It had belonged to the city doctor before him, a botanist who'd traveled to the Orient and had been forced out of Augsburg. That man kept his house even after he left. When he died, and his widow died a year later, the house was sold with everything in it, and the doctor who'd lived there started selling books to the emperor the year it was sold. The emperor already knew that house. He'd paid its owner three hundred and ten thalers, years before, for four books of real dried plants, and Rudolf was a man who once grumbled that for the price of some tulip bulbs he could have gone to the Orient himself. possibly says the historian who found the account entries the heirs had the doctor sell some of the old man's books if they did the most mysterious book in the world may have walked out of an exile's house along with everything else in it the emperor paid the doctor in full his own chemist he kept waiting the chemist had grown up poor made a fortune from a remedy he distilled enough by one old account to lend the emperor enormous sums In October 1608, the emperor made him a nobleman, a knight with two horses and 20 florins a month. The money arrived once. The next payments only came after the emperor was dead, and the emperor died still owing him, and plenty of others, a great deal. His successor gave the chemist an estate to run instead of cash. Somewhere in all that, the chemist put his new noble name at the foot of the book's first page. Was the book part of what the emperor owed him? It's possible he was given it as part of the debt, or simply took it. With the paper trail that thin, the book itself was supposed to say more, and this March, the man who analyzed its ink for Yale back in 2009 dropped his own explanation, in front of a meeting of Voynich researchers online. His old report had named a brass ink pot as a possible source of the copper and zinc in the ink. He doesn't think that anymore, which leaves the copper and zinc with no explanation at all. Not your typical iron gall ink, he called it. The green paint was the most mysterious thing in it, he said, and one substance isn't even in his lab's catalogue. He also put a better-than-equal chance on the writing and the drawings coming out of the same batches of ink. If they did, the words and the pictures came from one supply. Where it had been since was a different matter, and Voynich had his own story about that. He told it in public after the war. He'd shipped the whole collection across the Atlantic to keep it from the Zeppelins, and, in the end, to sell it. In Philadelphia, he said the books had lain for decades in chests in an ancient castle in southern Europe. Where exactly, he wouldn't say, because he hoped to buy the rest of the collection one day. I refrain from giving details about the locality of the castle. His castle, by the look of it, had started out somewhere in Austria. After the agents, it was in southern Europe. The castle story didn't sell it. He managed to get worldwide publicity for the manuscript, which he hoped he could leverage into a $100,000 sale, but because the manuscript was so weird, nobody wanted to take the risk because he couldn't prove it was authentic. A few months before he died, Voynich wrote his will by hand, and the book got a section of its own. After a few gifts of money, he left the rest to his wife and his secretary. This one he wanted sold to a public institution, by a committee of five, his wife, his secretary, a librarian and two professors, each of them paid $3,000 for the trouble. 10% of whatever it fetched after that was to go to the widow of the professor who'd once announced he could read it, and 5% to the man who'd edited that professor's book. One of the two professors on the committee had taken that reading apart. What they were trying to sell had been stitched together once, centuries earlier. Two painted streams run into the fold of one page, and they come out again three leaves further on, on the other half of the same folded sheet. This July, two researchers published what that means. The book is made of folded sheets, and the two halves of a sheet match each other better, on average, than the pages that now face them. Splashes, a blue petal, a green leaf, even the arm of one of the bathing women, all of them cross the fold onto the other half of their own sheet, a page that isn't next to them anymore. Put two of the sections back in the order the sheets point to, and the writing on the pages that meet matches up to a fifth better. Yale's conservator checked the stitching and found no sign of more than one sewing. So it was bound once, in the 15th century, and bound wrong. This may be one reason why the Voynich manuscript has been so difficult to crack. How can you read a book whose pages are out of order? On the sixth of this month, a national newspaper ran it, and within days it was everywhere. The pages, the two of them said, started out as loose folded sheets, like a stack of Christmas cards, meant to be read one after another. Once you treat them as loose pages stacked together, Colin Layfield said, all these artistic anomalies suddenly join up. The only other books Lisa Fagan Davis knows that were made like that are Qurans probably handed out in pieces for teaching. So it starts to look like a set of booklets through which information was passed down from one generation to the next. She went further. I very much hope, and I want, but I cannot prove, and this is totally hypothetical, I very much want it to be a book by women for women, preserving women's knowledge to pass on to other generations. Whoever bound it wrong, she added, still did us a huge favor by ensuring its survival. The Voynich turned up two days later as a question in that paper's weekly quiz, and one of the wrong answers was the Necronomicon. Not everyone accepted the order they'd rebuilt. The day after the July study came out, one critic asked whether the book had ever been rebound. No, Layfield answered. The book was bound once, according to the conservator at Yale. Later that day, the same critic argued that sorting pages by the words on them makes any sequence look smooth all by itself. Another critic went through the method, and in mid-July, Davis wrote back that the data for the plant pages alone does not show they were ever loose sheets. That's 30 of the 52 sheets. But the streams still cross the fold, and there's still only one sewing. Whatever order the makers meant, the person who first stitched it got it wrong, and every owner since, from the chemist who signed its first page to Voynich, had it in that wrong order. Voynich's heirs knew none of that when they tried to sell it. He'd left real debts, and even the yearly insurance on the manuscript became a burden. Business is rotten is all that one hears from morning till night, his secretary wrote in one letter, and in a later one, we have been living on borrowed money. The estate tax, by her account, makes me shiver in my bones. At the end of 1933, the professors on the committee agreed to cut their $3,000 down to 3% of whatever it really sold for. Another dealer, meanwhile, asked her in a job interview whether the estate would take $50,000. He most likely didn't have that kind of money, and wouldn't have risked it on a book that problematic. Nothing came of it. So they're stuck with it. They put it in a safe, and they just leave it. Even as they're selling off all of their stock, shutting down the business, but they still have the Voynich manuscript sitting in a safe, and they're paying to insure it. but they and they cannot they cannot get rid of the damn thing she was still asking herself in her notebook years later whether to let it go at auction and risk it being lost or hang on to it at whatever cost to me for 30 years the book was valued at 19,400 and the appraisers gave the reason it couldn't be worth more the historical connection of the manuscript has not been established nobody could say where it came from she sold it in the end for cash and eight years later, the dealer who bought it gave it to Yale, saying it was the right thing to do. A historian who traced its owners worked out what else that year meant. Although he did not mention it in his autobiography, these gifts almost certainly were triggered by the fact that Congress had changed the tax law. Under a new tax law, from the 1st of January, a dealer could deduct a gift like that only at what he'd paid for it. Given before then, at the price he'd been asking, the deduction might have saved him as much as $123,200, given a year later, it was worth $18,865 at most. He gave the Library of Congress his Spanish-American manuscripts that December. That was the difference between the 31st of December and the 1st of January. He said it belonged where anyone could study it. Just before that Christmas, copies of the manuscript had gone somewhere far less open. Three bound volumes of photocopies were handed over as a gift to a man who'd run code-breaking for Hitler's high command during the war and then West Germany's cipher agency. In March, newly retired, he wrote about the gift to the deputy director of the NSA, and he promised, in German, "...of course I will behave so that no difficulties arise. I will always come to you first if I find anything new." He didn't expect much, he added, because in the NSA's own service, hand-picked experts hadn't found a solution. His letter came back across the Atlantic in a pouch, with a note on top. We received this in our pouch today for passing to you. The deputy director answered that autumn. Several of our people have made casual off-duty examinations of the manuscript, but with no promising results. We have not attempted to mount an all-out or a systematic attack upon it, although from time to time such an attack has been talked about, particularly by some of our alumni. He sent an article along, and nothing else. The agency kept its file on the book out of sight for almost 50 years, and when it finally came out, the name of an NSA retiree who'd spent many years on the Voynich was still blacked out. In it, one employee asks where to find a copy, and a colleague points to a file on a Russian website, one he says he didn't dare open from work. The agents who'd searched Voynich's office in the first war hadn't found anything either. The professor the army asked to look at the book, the same man who'd later sit on Voynich's Committee, reported that it was an ancient document with no bearing of any sort upon the present war. What Voynich had promised to keep quiet went back to a Monday in Rome, more than 40 years before that war. Going back further, Voynich bought it in Rome, and he acquired it from the library of the Jesuits outside Rome, and it had been there for hundreds of years. On the 20th of October 1873, the new Italian state took over six religious houses in Rome, four of them the Jesuits, and confiscated the library of their college. Every priest was handed a pension of 600 francs, every lay brother 300. Some of the books got away. Three collections escaped by being labeled as the private library of the Jesuits General because a man's personal property was allowed to stay with him. The small collection with the Voynich in it was hidden in a villa at Castel Gandolfo, lent by a prince who was the general's friend. It stayed there for almost 40 years. The confiscations had gutted the order's income by then, and it needed money. The Jesuits of Rome drew up two catalogs of the books hidden in the villa, and the oldest collection, the one with the Voynich in it, went up for sale. Their original sale list only turned up again seven years ago. The Vatican's own library came in quietly. In June 1912, the head of the Jesuits' Roman province wrote to the Vatican's chief librarian. They were selling because they needed money, and there was already a bid of 500 lire a manuscript on the table. That bid was almost certainly Voynich's. The librarian had to invent a pretext for his visit, because nobody below the very top could know why he was going, and on the 24th of June, the house diary has him inside the villa. He valued the collection at 50,000 lire and warned that once it was bought, the greatest discretion would be needed. The Pope answered in his own hand, prudenter et sine strepitu, carefully and without noise. The money had been paid by the middle of July, and 12 or 13 crates had arrived, about 200 manuscripts. Inside those books, the general's name was scratched out. Selling to the Vatican cost the Jesuits a lot of money. But for the librarian, letting a private dealer have everything was far too risky. Voynich had already had his pick. Two of his manuscripts, once owned by a king of Hungary, were on offer to the Hungarians that summer, and a scholar there lectured that they had to come home. The bishop there had first heard about them 45 years earlier, and when they finally turned up, he couldn't raise the money. J.P. Morgan ended up with them, along with a third book, for more than $100,000, and one of the dealers in between bought himself a villa near Florence with his share. Voynich received 300,000 lire for the pair, six times what the Pope's library paid for the 200 manuscripts it took. Until recently, this is how the story went. What really happened, we don't know, but the story goes that he was there, they needed some money, they said to him, buy whatever you want, just go rummage, and he found this manuscript and he just kind of added it to his pile. A priest got him in. Father Joseph Strickland, born on Malta, had been to the villa twice that April, and Voynich's name appears in none of its house diaries. At the end of June, Strickland wrote to him. He and Father Rector know that you have so generously helped us to pay our creditors and join me in praying God to reward you in this world and in the next. A few lines further down. It is better not to say anything even to our holy rector for the present. Someone penciled three words on that letter. Safe to keep. Other letters from him seem to have been destroyed. One from the following year survived, and in it, Strickland tells Voynich to pay a visit to the safe deposit in Chancery Lane, and adds that The old lady who wanted you to see her pictures has written two or three times. Those were the guardians. An order that needed money and sold its hidden books. a priest who asked for silence, and a buyer who promised to keep it. During his lifetime, he refused to say where he had acquired it. It leaked anyway. Four months after Voynich died, his widow, the novelist who wrote The Gadfly, wrote down what she knew. The cipher manuscript was bought in or about 1911. The intermediary was an English Jesuit, Father Strickland, who knew that the sale of certain manuscripts had been decided upon if a buyer could be found whose discretion could be trusted. And Voynich was allowed to buy, after giving a promise of secrecy. Even she had the seller wrong. She thought it had been the Vatican's, kept in a castle near Rome. It was the Jesuits, in a villa at Castel Gandolfo. His old shop assistant in London, clearing out the closed shop years later, found the little slips Voynich had taken out of the manuscripts, and each one named the same owner. the private library of the Jesuits General. The man the agents had written up as possibly a German had been keeping a Jesuit secret all along.