An encyclopedia from nowhere
In 1981, the Italian artist, architect, and designer Luigi Serafini published the Codex Seraphinianus. He created the roughly 360-page book over a period of 30 months between 1976 and 1978. The volume is an visual encyclopedia of a imaginary world, filled with detailed colored-pencil illustrations of its flora, fauna, physics, and societies. The first edition, published by Franco Maria Ricci, was issued in two volumes with an initial print run of 5,000 copies.
The book is divided into eleven chapters, which themselves are grouped into two main sections. The first section catalogues the natural world: flora, including trees that uproot themselves to migrate; fauna, with surreal depictions of animals like horses and birds; and a separate chapter on a kingdom of strange bipedal beings. The second section addresses the humanities of this alien world, covering topics like architecture, clothing, history, games, and cuisine. One illustration shows a couple metamorphosing into an alligator during intercourse, while another depicts a plant that grows into the shape of a chair before being harvested and used as one. The famous Italian writer Italo Calvino wrote an introduction for an early edition of the book.
A language that isn't
The entire Codex is annotated in a unique, unreadable script. The writing system flows from left to right and features both uppercase and lowercase letters, some of which appear to double as numerals. Luigi Serafini has stated that the script is "asemic," meaning it has no meaning. He explained in a 2009 talk at Oxford University that his goal was to show the sensation a young child has when looking at a book before they can read—an awareness that the text is meaningful for adults, but personally incomprehensible.
Despite the author's claims, the script shows signs of internal consistency that have attracted analysis. Linguists and cryptographers have noted that some letters appear only at the beginning or end of words, a feature common to Semitic languages. While the language itself remains a mystery, the page numbering system has been successfully decoded. Allan C. Wechsler and the Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski independently determined that the numbers operate on a base-21 system. This discovery confirmed that at least one element of the script follows a logical, decipherable structure. The continued analysis and debate over the text's potential meaning have led to comparisons with the famous 15th-century Voynich Manuscript, another beautifully illustrated and undeciphered book.