Codex Seraphinianus

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The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an extraterrestrial world, and written in a strange alien language.

Image:Codex-seraphinianus-abbeville.jpg

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, not unlike cursive Georgian in appearance. 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. The number system used for numbering the pages, however, has been cracked by Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski [1]. It appears to be a variant on base 21.

A rare and expensive book, the original edition was issued in two volumes (Luigi Serafini, Codex Seraphinianus, Milano: Franco Maria Ricci [I segni dell'uomo], 1981, 127+127 pp., 108+128 plates, ISBN 88-216-0026-2 + ISBN 88-216-0027-0). A single-volume edition was published by Abbeville Press in the U.S. (1st American edition, New York: Abbeville Press, 1983, 250 pp., ISBN 0896594289) and by Prestel in Germany (München: Prestel, 1983, 370 pp., ISBN 3-7913-0651-0). These editions were out of print for many years, but as of 1993 a new, augmented, single-volume edition of the book was being sold in Europe (French augmented edition, with a preface by Italo Calvino, transl. by Yves Hersant and Geneviève Lambert, Milano: Franco Maria Ricci [I segni dell'uomo], 1993, 392 pp., ISBN 88-216-2027-1 / Spanish augmented edition, with a preface by Italo Calvino, transl. by C. Alonso, Milano: Franco Maria Ricci [I segni dell'uomo], 1993, 392 pp., ISBN 88-216-6027-3). A Dutch edition was also issued (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, ISBN 9029084022). The book can occasionally be found in large public libraries, especially University libraries, and/or obtained by inter-library loan requests.