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.