Eureka! I found it. I can’t tell you how long I’ve been searching for this elusive thing of mystery – so long in fact that I doubted my own recollection, thought that maybe I had dreamt it all up. But it’s real, it exists, and now my search is at an end. I literally whooped with joy when I came across this. But first a little backstory.
It began innocently enough, on a blustery fall day at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, sometime in the early 80’s (yes, I know that’s dating me). I came up from Chicago to visit a friend of mine who was a student there, and we were in his buddy’s living room. I don’t remember much else about that visit or his friend (sorry about that) but on the coffee table there was a book.
I opened the pages of the book. I didn’t know what I was looking at. I had entered a fantasy realm of strange creatures, impossible plants and flowers, morphed and mutated human-like forms. All hand-illustrated, beautifully imagined, but depicting a fever-dream alternate reality unlike any I had ever seen.
I wanted that book! I remember I offered some outrageous sum of money that I’m sure didn’t even have, but he wouldn’t part with it, not for anything.
What was this world? It was disturbing, hallucinatory, definitely unsettling yet oddly well-organized with its own consistent inner logic, somehow just at the edge of comprehension and plausibility. It was even annotated, using a gorgeous, flowing script in a written language that has never existed. I wanted that book!
Eventually I had to return to Chicago and my own studies while the mystery tome was left behind. I’ve thought about it many times since then, puzzled over the absolute originality of it, but I never heard another blip about it. That is until recently, when the miracle of the Internet brought it forth once more into the light of day. At last I have found the Codex!
Or I should say the Codex Seraphinianus. It sprouted from the brain of Italian designer and architect Luigi Serafini, who intended it as a fictional encyclopedia of an alien world rendered in loving detail.
And like an encyclopedia it appears to be organized into familiar categories – what seems to be a table of contents and sections on geography, biology, anthropology, history and mundane daily life, but all of it twisted through a slightly macabre fun-house mirror.
Mr. Serafini has said he wanted the language to resemble what children experience when they first learn to read – the unfolding wonder of meaning slowly revealing itself.
Be warned. If you enter into its pages you may never return, or may not want to.