An Introduction to the Codex Seraphinianus, the Strangest Book Ever Published (openculture.com)

It is so strange that books like this cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars to buy.

You might think the publisher would ........ publish some to sell.

Copies hung around my partners secondhand bookshop for years. This was in the 1980s. Properly shelved under "esoterica"

1st Ed. Now worth $6,000 oh well.

I have a nice copy, at least as of a few years ago you can get them for relatively cheap. I've been meaning to put scans of the text into OpenCV and play a bit to see if there's an underlying code. The number system in the page numbers has been cracked as far as I know.

Hmmm, Now I need to find out where my copy is hiding. I really need to reorganize the books again. I savored this for a while, but have not gone through the entire book yet. Sort of like War & Peace - books that everyone must read before they die, and I am saving them for insurance.

I own a copy, never fails to weird people out when they flip through. Highly recommend.

Writing system [0]: "In a talk at the Oxford University Society of Bibliophiles on 11 May 2009 [1], Serafini stated that there is no meaning behind the Codex's script, which is asemic; that his experience in writing it was similar to automatic writing [2]; and that what he wanted his alphabet to convey was the sensation children feel with books they cannot yet understand, although they see that the writing makes sense for adults. However, the book's page-numbering system was decoded by Allan C. Wechsler and Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski, as being a variation of base 21."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus#Writing_sy...

[1] I could not find a source for that talk

[2] Automatic writing, also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing

XKCD's explanation: [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/593/

I sold my first edition almost 10 years ago to fund (partially) my unemployment during a career transition to data science. A couple years, ago my brother bought me a nice reissue for Christmas without ever knowing I once owned a copy. Odd how some things will make their way to you in the world.

Funnily enough just yesterday I spent an hour or so looking through a copy in a library! I took some photos, you can look through them here: https://marzchipane.com/reviews/books/codex_seraphinianus.md

The illustrations are gorgeous, and they've been floating around the internet for some time, e.g. the one with the pairs of fish which look like eyes.

I have a second edition. I got it because there was some review that portrayed it as a mysterious creepy thing, but it wasn't that creepy at all. The art is well done and fun to look at, and it's a fine balance of something that you feel like you have figured out but just slightly evades your understanding.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/LLFrSW9XQLUqc8348

I paid $110 for it in 2013. They put out a new edition every few years with a few extra pages added, so I am sure my copy has declined in value since.