We’re looking at an exceptionally rainy, cold weekend here, and I don’t foresee any real reason to leave the house. So I was pleased to find out, via the Book Bench, that all of Luigi Serafini’s big, weird, trippy Codex Seraphinianus has been digitized and posted online. Serafini’s alternate world, complete with its own bizarre ecology and invented calligraphy, seems like a good place to get lost when the weather outside is frightful. Or even when it’s not.
I’m sure holding the actual book in my hands would be a whole lot more rewarding. But given the fact that used copies are going for upward of $400, and that I’ve long wanted to get my hands on one of these, I’m not complaining.
That’s trippy.
Wow. Beautiful.
Fantastische! It’s like he’s channeling Redoute, Hokusai, Escher, Dali, Max Ernst, R. Crumb, and ancient Terabitho-Earthsea-Bas-Lagian historians – all at the same time. Wonderful and somehow unsettling at the same time.
I’m curious if the script can actually be de-coded into a meaningful language or if it’s merely (and I hesitate to use that term) artistic.
That first picture is amazing and terrifying.