A postcard to Paris sheds light on the Voynich Manuscript

In 1912, Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a Polish-born antiquarian based in New York, made a sensational discovery in an Italian monastery: a manuscript filled with strange plants, diagrams, and text in an unknown language. He would spend the rest of his life trying to decipher it. That book, now known as the Voynich Manuscript, became one of the most baffling enigmas in the history of written culture. At the time, many believed it could be the work of 13th-century scholar Roger Bacon, a medieval pioneer of science and coded writing.

Nearly a decade later, on October 8, 1921, Voynich sent a brief handwritten postcard to the J. Gamber bookstore at 7 rue Danton in Paris. He wasn’t placing an order, but sharing his current research interests. He wrote:

Please send me regularly catal. [catalogue]. I am buying old medicine, maths, physics, Americana, incunables. Everything by and about Roger Bacon,

A seemingly routine message, yet deeply revealing: this note shows that Voynich was still searching, following every lead, hoping that somewhere - perhaps in a Parisian bookseller’s catalogue - lay a key to unlock the manuscript’s meaning.

The Voynich Manuscript is known today as "the most famous manuscript in the world", and it still resists all attempts at decipherment, despite more than a century of efforts by researchers, scholars, and cryptographers. This postcard offers a quiet but vivid glimpse into that long, unresolved pursuit.