Codex Seraphinianus

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the most inventive graphic work of the 20th Century
Review: An encyclopedia of an imaginary world akin to ours but both more beautiful and less intelligible that forces the reader/viewer to re-think the methods by which we try to make sense of things. An encyclopedia is a synoptic version of the order by which we attempt to see the world. Such books reflect a "scientific" method which has ordered sight especially since the enlightenment but back to the taxonomies of Aristotle. This volume alludes to our desire to place sensation into category but offers, tacitly, other criteria of analogy and relation that undo the habits of too tutored thought. PS A 1st edition is now up to 500-700$.

Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece of nonsense
Review: The book is a piece of conceptual art. You open it and are confronted with what looks to be an profusely illustrated encyclopedia of things you have never before seen. The illustrations are inspired and colorful works done in colored pencil. The text is in a made-up language. You are left to decide what this all means, so it is also a puzzle book.

It's a shame it's out of print. It's worth seeking out a copy.

Rating:
Summary: The encyclopeadia of an imaginary world
Review: We owe this 20-year old piece of high fantasy to a Roman architect, Luigi Serafini. This is a large book of splendid, eerie illustrations of an impossible world in a parallel universe, with copious comments in an incomprehensible language in an imaginary script. A world at once familiar, inhabited as it is by humans, and hauntingly different, with its very own laws of physics, its strange fauna, its stranger flora, its unimaginable society, technology, even mathematics. The Codex Seraphinianus is to that world what Diderot's Encyclopaedia is to ours, only lavishly and artistically illustrated. A feast for the eyes, a tease for the brain, to which you will find yourselves drawn again and again, and again, in ever renewed fascination. It is a particular joy in the Italian edition (published by Franco Maria Ricci of Milan) if you can afford the outrageous price -- some US$250: hand-made paper, a hard-cover bound in black silk in a box clad in black silk, such luxuries do not come cheaply

Rating:
Summary: book for the lonely island, if only one was allowed
Review: Whenever you open this book, you will be absorbed by the abundance of creativity and imagination and due to to the cryptic way of comunication you keep on wondering if you will be the first to enter this hermetic world of L.S. Breathtaking.