Here’s a bizzare art book with strange creatures and illegible writing.
The book itself costs $400 (or $100 if you order from Europe). Seems like more of a novelty book than anything substantive. Douglas Hoftstader comments:
Many of the pictures are grotesque and disturbing, but others are extremely beautiful and visionary. The inventiveness that it took to come up with all these conceptions of a hypothetical land is staggering.
Some people with whom I have shared this book find it frightening or disturbing in some way. It seems to them to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility. There is very little to fasten onto; everything shifts, shimmers, slips. Yet the book has a kind of unearthly beauty and logic to it, qualities pleasing to a different class of people: people who are more at ease with free-wheeling fantasy and, in some sense, craziness. I see some parallels between musical composition and this kind of invention. Both are abstract, both create a mood, both rely largely on style to convey content.
For another novelty book that is substantially cheaper, I recommend How to Create a Flawless Universe in just eight days. Every person I show the book to finds it amazing, and I do too. (Here’s the Teleread piece I did about novelty books and How to Create a Flawless Universe). The print copy is available for less than a dollar.
From the wikipedia article on the Codex, two other interesting links: Ummo, an extraterrestrial hoax and Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a Borges story I thought I had read but turns out not to have done.
From a great thread on obscure novels, some great Eastern European finds: Frigyes Karinthy fiction and Hungarian short stories. Keep in mind by the way that I blog on Teleread about literary matters (the RSS feed is on the right side of the page).
Save the Short Story, a literary blog discussing shorter literary forms. Run by Pei-Ling Lue, a literary editor. Interesting that such a generic subject for a blog can be so interesting and relevant.
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Holy crap, it’s been years since I heard or thought about the Codex Seraphinianus. I tried to find a copy years, ago, after reading about it in one of Hodfstadter’s books, but couldn’t find it.
I like how Mr. Douglas Hoftstader relate it to musical compositions. I’m a musician myself, so I can envision what he’s trying to describe. Great post, thanks for sharing!