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The Codex Seraphinianus

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Just downloaded the pdf. Thanks for that!

I know someone who is an old school bookbinder, I'm thinking of having this printed on fine paper and letting her bind it with a cool leather or marbled cover. Maybe not that cheap a solution, but I'm loving the idea of having a beautifully bound book with no title or reference on the cover on my shelves filled with such beatutifull and mystical content. :)
 
I discovered recently this amazing work of art by Luigi Serafini, wich is an encyclopedia of a mysterious, surreal universe. It is written in an cryptographic language and is asemic. He goes into the fauna and flora, the agriculture and science, society and human activities, clothing and mysterious objects. I loved going over the entire book and getting into Luigi's amazing world and feel like some people here may appreciate his work!

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You can see the whole thing over there:
issuu.com

Codex Seraphinianus

Written in a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing, the Codex Seraphinianus, by the Italian artist Luigi Serafini, appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world.
issuu.com issuu.com
 
Quite remarkable, no? I have a PDF of the entire manuscript and have been wanting to get a real copy for quite some time, but they are very pricey. It would definitely spark conversations as a coffee table book! Some day i will have a real copy... Is yours a bona fide printed copy?

Cheers,

JBArk
 
Hard to believe someone would spend so much time compiling an illegible and indecipherable tome... even harder to believe that knowing one exists, not many have read it or even heard of it ! Owning a copy is on my bucket list (far down, but there :) )

JBArk
 
aaaaa, the codex seraphinianus! such an unbelievably unique book. The things he managed to pull out of his imagination and put onto paper are just mind blowing

i was looking at it online last week for the first time in a while and realized the real life version is a must
 
I snapped up a copy of this a while back (and it cost a pretty penny too!) and if you ever get the chance to own one I can't recommend it strongly enough. It is a wonderful book to explore by oneself, especially on entheogens (don't go through it with friends or you lose half the experience), and assembled from lovely thick natural paper with care and delicacy. It's not an 'off the mill' book - the costs of making each copy must be very high. The feeling of holding and reading it is exactly like being a pre-literate child again and looking through an old encyclopedia without being able to read it - the feeling that there is information there that someone else might be able to get at, but is out of your reach. So all you have to go by are the pictures, which take on a strange new vivid liveliness as your mind tries to extract from the illustration what it could not glean from the impenetrable text.

I hear libraries keep their copies of it in the head librarian's private reserve section because people steal them for the high resale value.
 
After discovering this book for the first time in this thread, I did a little legwork and decided to share.

Apparently the author of this book, Luigi Serafini, spent two years in isolation creating this work of art. He speaks little about it, but claims that the script and images came to him in a form of half-concious automatic writing. The script is supposed to recreate the awe that children experience when they see adult books before they know how to read them.

I wonder if this is an actual place Luigi visited somehow, maybe even through his dreams. Nikola Tesla used to claim that he would have visions of devices of strange origin, and he would test these devices in his dreams and if they worked he would build them in real life. He's known to have come up with some really far out there concepts concerning how we view energy manipulation. It seems Luigi also had some sort of dream or vision with strange devices and he did a fantastic job capturing their obscurity.
 
Hate to double post, but Terence McKenna mentioned having certain insights into the Voynich Manuscript which is a similar text to this Codex. Out of curiosity, how here has tripped while studying this book? Any psychedelic insights into the content at all? Seems very psychedelic to me...
 
Last year they finally reprinted the Codex Seraphinianus. Meaning you can now get your own brand new copy for 75 bucks, instead of buying a used first copy from the 70's for $300 (tattered) to $2000 (unmarred but aged).

If you have the cash lying around, this is a GREAT book. Printed on thick textured paper and well bound, it is the Codex restored to its former glory! I have been waiting fifteen years to have my very own copy, and was delighted when they reprinted it.

CODEX

Cheers,

JBArk
 
You guys might also like having a look at the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum in the book pages has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.[1][2] The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[3]

The pages of the codex are vellum. Some of the pages are missing, but about 240 remain. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams.
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