Codex Seraphinianus

The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by the Italian painter Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. The book is 400-odd pages long, and appears to be a travelogue of an alien world, and written in a strange alien language.

The illustrations are often surreal parodies of things in our world: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into a reptile; etc.

The false writing system appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase, and probably contains a separate set of symbols for writing numerals) but is much more curvilinear. The language of the codex has defied complete analysis by linguists for decades, although the small amount of progress that has been made seems to verify that the book does indeed contain meaningful text.

This is a rare and expensive book, and may be easier to find at a public library.

See article on the Voynich Manuscript.