Large hardbound with Dust Jacket approx. 14 x 10 inches. First Printing of the American edition. 370 pages. Full black cloth binding with title to spine in gold and title blind stamped to cover. With color illustrations throughout. Beautifully designed and published. Book and Dust Jacket AS NEW. Not read. All corners pointed. Binding tight and square. Without tears, creases, bumps or chips. Not marked in any way and very clean, glossy and bright. Dust jacket same. All items carefully wrapped and sent boxed.  Some people think it’s one of the weirdest books ever published. An art book unlike any other art book. A unique and disturbing surreal parody. Grotesque and beautiful. Codex Seraphinianus by Italian artist Luigi Serafini is a window on a bizarre fantasy world complete with its own unique (unreadable) alphabet and numerous illustrations that borrow from the modern age but veer into the extremely unusual. The Codex is an encyclopedia in manuscript with copious hand-drawn, colored-pencil illustrations of bizarre and fantastical flora, fauna, anatomies, fashions, and foods. It has been compared to the still undeciphered Voynich manuscript, the art of M. C. Escher and Hieronymus Bosch. The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in the real world, such as a bleeding fruit, a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one, and a copulating couple who metamorphose into an alligator. Others depict odd, apparently senseless machines, often with delicate appearances and bound by tiny filaments. Some illustrations are recognizable as maps or human faces, while others (especially in the "physics" chapter) are mostly or totally abstract. Nearly all of the illustrations are brightly colored and highly detailed. The false writing system appears modeled on Western writing systems, with left-to-right writing in rows and an alphabet with upper case and lowercase letters, some of which double as numerals. Some letters appear only at the beginning or end of words, similar to Semitic writing systems. The curvilinear letters are rope- or thread-like, with loops and even knots,  and are somewhat reminiscent of Sinhala script.