Codex Seraphinianus
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The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by the Italian painter Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. The book is 364 pages long, and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an alien world, and written in a strange alien language.
The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into a crocodile; etc.
The false writing system appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase, and probably contains a separate set of symbols for writing numerals) but is much more curvilinear. The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades, although the small amount of progress that has been made seems to verify that the book does indeed contain meaningful text.
This is a rare and expensive book. The original edition was in two volumes. A single-volume edition was published by Abbeville Press in the US. Both editions were out of print for many years, but as of 2004 a new single-volume edition of the book was being sold in Europe. The book can occasionally be found in large public libraries, especially University libraries, and/or obtained by inter-library loan requests.
See also
External links
- An unofficial Codex Serafinianus site (http://www.io.com/~iareth/codindx.html)
- Codex Seraphinianus: Some Observations (http://www.math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html) on the writing system
- Another Green World: The Codex Seraphinianus (http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?rw.codex), by John Coulthart
- Tricodex (http://www.bam.org/events/04TRIC/04TRIC.aspx), an acrobatic ballet inspired by the Codex Seraphinianus
- Chapitre.com (http://www.chapitre.com/fl/actus/fmr/livres_signes.htm) is a French bookseller that sells the modern edition
- Peter Schwenger's Codex Seraphinianus, Hallucinatory Encyclopedia (http://faculty.msvu.ca/pschwenger/codex.htm)
- Another site on Serafini and the Codex (http://www.almaleh.com/serafini-e.htm)