Luigi Serafini - Flora, “Codex Seraphinianus”, 1981.
Codex Seraphinianus is regarded by many to be the strangest book in the world. It is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world written in a cipher alphabet in an imaginary language. The book is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, pencil illustrations. It has been compared to the Voynich manuscript, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, and the works of M.C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch.
The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world. The writing system (possibly a false writing system) appears modeled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals). Some letters appear only at the beginning or at the end of words, a feature shared with Semitic writing systems. The curvilinear letters of the alphabet are rope- or thread-like, displaying loops and even knots, and are somewhat reminiscent of Sinhala alphabets, but the language of the book has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades.
Serafini stated that there is no meaning hidden behind the script of the Codex, which is asemic; that his own experience in writing it was closely similar to automatic writing; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey to the reader is the sensation that children feel in front of books they cannot yet understand, although they see that their writing does make sense for grown-ups.
stormborns
areudirty
origamiaround
gummygunk
kaledo-art
romaincrisis
