In the late 70s italian architect, illustrator and industrial designer Luigi Serafini made a book, an encyclopedia of unknown, parallel world. it’s about 360-380 pages. it is written in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet. it took him 30 month to complete that masterpiece that many might call “the strangest book on earth”. Codex Seraphinianus is divided to 11 chapters and two parts - first one is about nature and the second one is about people. btw five hundred years ago there was another book somewhat like that - Voynich Manuscript.
take a look at some pages (click on image to see a bigger version)
amazon sells those for 500 bucks or more
you can read about it in wikipedia.
i can’t even tell you how much i like stuff like that
phat a?
update related links
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus - article in wikipedia
the-dimka.livejournal.com/6645.html - my entry in LiveJournal
inde.ru/tmp/Codex_Seraphinianus.pdf - the entire book in pdf (50mb)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_Manuscript - Voynich Manuscript
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tlön%2C_Uqbar%2C_Orbis_Tertius - “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” - and article of same kind, that was written by Jorge Luis Borges in the early 20 centure
grapefruitopia.com/seraphinianus - a site were the talk a lot about the book
cr.cx/seraphinianus/codex - a site where they tell you who codex’ alphabet was decrypted
math.bas.bg/~iad/serafin.html - bolgarian linguist ivan derzhanskiy about decoding text and numbers
spamula.net/blog - a blog where tons of other art material, i found it when i was looking for info about the book. they have tons of interesting art things there
imdb.com/title/tt0070544 - franch animation film La Planète sauvage, it has many similarities
flickr.com/photos/3e/sets/72157600089509882 - flickr set, with entire Voynich Manuscript
horg.com/chasm installation project dedicated to this book (burning man 2004)
liberonweb.com/asp/libro.asp?ISBN=8817013897 - an italian site that sells this book for reasonable money
update 2
i ordered the book and it arrived. it is gigantic in size, thick and large. print, paper and binding quality is superb. they also insert a booklet - decodex, but it is in italian and i have not mastered that one yet.
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