Seraphinianus

I have wanted to own a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus for over thirty years, ever since I saw a copy at my best friend Erik's house that belonged to his father. It is a book of fantastic illustrations and seemingly indecipherable text, an Encyclopedia of an impossible, surreal dream world. The creator is one Luigi Serafini, an Italian architect who did the drawings and wrote the text over a period of three years in the late '70s. The drawings—ink and colored pencils, mostly—show animals that look like plants, plants that look like man-made artifacts, and artifacts that look like people. In one series of illustrations, people having sex on a couch transform into an alligator.

On another page, pairs of fish with iris-like decorations appear as the malevolent gaze of a living ocean.

The text is a combination of strange capital letters, some of which look like illustrations of knot work, and some kind of flowing script that looks like mirrored cursive mixed with Arabic writing. Diagrams appear that seem to illustrate taxonomies, or possibly some kind of imaginary math, or linguistic diagrams of his made up language. I doubt it really means anything, but it does a remarkable job of looking like it means something.

It has also been notoriously hard to find, having been out of print in the US for twenty years. Good copies of the original sell on ebay for hundreds of dollars, maybe even thousands. In 1996, when I went to work for the now-defunct Borders Books, it was the first book I looked for, and finding it out of print was my first great disappointment at that job.

There's a second edition out, however, which I discovered a little over a month ago when I was idly musing about the book and entered the title into Google. My heart soared when I saw that among the first hits was a link from a certain well-known online retailer, and I put it in my shopping cart until I could afford to spend $85 US—on sale, nonetheless—for a book.

I do not regret that decision.

cheers,
Adam