The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus | Hacker News Reader

The 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus

insider.com

215 pointsdsr1264 comments

Huhm, the one that came to mind for me is <blue>House</blue> of Leaves, though I guess it's only 21 years old. It's (almost) fully legible English, but the pages are all sorts of messed up: Text goes forward, backward, sideways, meanders outside standard directions (including through the page), the footnotes span multiple pages and have their own multiple-page footnotes (all telling multiple storylines in parallel) (also one of the footnotes is editing the book as you read it), there's one section written in a simplistic code...

There's some pictures of the pages of this book in these reviews:

http://www.cornerfolds.com/2014/08/book-review-house-of-leav...

https://stingingfly.org/2016/11/01/house-leaves-mark-z-danie...

https://www.horrorbuzz.com/2015/09/13/house-of-leaves/#

http://www.thefeedbacksociety.com/television/house-of-leaves...

I remember being very annoyed I could not buy that book in ebook format on Amazon or anywhere else. It was recommended to me for the story. So when I finally caved in and bought the paper version, it all made sense.

Although House Of Leaves is odd it is not even the oddest thing Mark Z Danielewski has written, and there’s pretty strong competition from others. Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany is more restrained in its typography but has a strange looping narrative that starts and ends in the middle of the same sentence; Lanark by Alasdair Gray has incredible typographic feats and certainly a strange story; and the works of B S Johnson probably have them all beat.

And then there are things like Cyberpositive by 0(rphan)d(rift>)…

> has a strange looping narrative that starts and ends in the middle of the same sentence

James Joyce did that with Finnegan’s Wake back in the ‘30s.

True, but of the two I think Dhalgren is easier to recommend to a stranger, who I only know liked House of Leaves.

I've never even read Dhalgren, but I'm sure you're right :-)

Those tricks are kinda obvious and have been around since the sixties at the least, in various combinations. See e.g. Principia Discordia, or Infinite Jest for footnotes. By the 2000s, this stuff was in popular magazines on videogames, specifically Russian ‘Game.exe’.

The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester[1] is a good proto-cyberpunk example from the '50s.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

Arno Schmidt began work in "this" style, culminating with Zettel's Traum in 1970.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/ZT_EA_Do...

To elaborate a bit on the difference: many of the ‘weird’ books mentioned here play with the form and the sequence, i.e. they tie the medium into their weirdness—and thus depend on it. The reader is presented with a complex piece, through which they must struggle to get more of the message.

‘Codex’, to my knowledge, doesn't do such tricks and is a rather straightforward book of illustrations—the difficulty is only that its contents aren't readable at all and the illustrations are completely foreign to our world. Unless you know its language, there's just no way for you to get any of the writing.

The former kind of books are high- or mid-brow cultural exercises, whereas ‘Codex’ is a pure surrealist dream.

Opening the article, I was actually worried that the author would begin talking about the meaning of the book, but thankfully he went the same route as David Lynch: while telling some secrets of the production, he said nothing about the content.

Article is pretty cool, and the book itself is amazing. The book is Codex Seraphianus, by Luigi Serafini, to save some of you a click. Apparently there is a new 40th anniversary edition with a few new pictures out now, but I think if you have an older edition you are fine.

I bought a used copy through AbeBooks (a book finding service) in the late 1990's after hungering after it for years. It cost $300 used back then, which seemed insane, but I've never regretted it. Some years later another edition came out for $150 or so, which is a downright bargain. I don't know if that one is still available.

AbeBooks still sends me about 1 notice per week 20+ years later whenever another copy becomes available. I could of course click the link to get them to stop, but receiving them makes me smile even though I have a procmail rule directing them to a special folder that I only look at occasionally. In internet terms, it seems like an unreal amount of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

This is the first I have heard of this book, and the article images were enough of a teaser that I'm very interested in the new printing.

But, your comment about not turning off notifications really resonates. I have had ebay notifications turned on for 2 items for 15 and 10 years. 1 is for a white whale motorcycle fender, but the other is for a Tektronics 465 flyback transformer. I get quite a few notifications about that, but I keep it going simply because it is a occasional reminder through the week of the project that got me seriously back into the electronics hobby. I now have better oscilloscopes, but the 465 remains on the bench. Part of it is it has the perfect cold War asthetic for proper mad-scientist vibes. But the main reason, and the reason I keep the 1 eBay notification going, is that that project is what got me back into electronics as a hobby and turned me away from the dark path I was heading down.

Glad I'm not alone in keeping a shopping notification going for the occasional pick-me-up reminder email. You just selected something much cooler than me. ;)

The Tektronix 465 is a classic!

Only because all the asshat ones went in a skip about three decades ago.

Having replaced the HV transformer on a tek 465 I would suggest buying another one that already works and using your current one as a parts mule. It’s fairly difficult to get the thing out as you have to go as far as removing the entire CRT. Also probably costs less!

Oh, to be clear I had rebuilt it 8 years ago. At the time it was either rebuild the Tek that the university lab was throwing out, or no scope at all. I had to wait for a good deal on a scrap one, someone was selling a scope that had had the front panel entirely smashed. But yeah, it was not an easy afternoon project. I wouldn't recommend it, but I did have fun and it looks great on the bench.

just to be up-to-date, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon now, since 2008

Dewey Decimal 039 (Encyclopedias in other languages)

Weirder than Hiroyuki Nishigaki's seminal "How to Good-bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?"

https://www.amazon.com/How-Good-bye-Depression-Constrict-Eve...

Is that just machine translated Engrish that’s been through an editor?

Not exactly. It's machine-translated Engrish, but I don't think it's fair to call whoever compiled it an editor.

Top review:

> My husband bought it for my 34th birthday. I do not recommend anyone buying this as an actual gift.

I might buy it as a gift based on the absurdity of the reviews and the title of the book.

There's more absurdity if you look at the "other customers also bought" section.

"Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes were unavailable for comment" I want to believe that is some dark sarcasm by the article's author

It clearly is and it honestly made me laugh. Knowing Umberto Eco, he would have loved the joke.

yes that was fun :)

Turns out Barthes died a full year before the book was even published, but he apparently saw a preliminary version, according to some random internet source in Italian.

This isn’t the Voynich manuscript. It’s not weirder than that one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Very artistic though. It is whimsical and full of drawings but gets a bit too much credit: LoTR has multiple real languages. The lore is even too dense, but it’s not weird? These drawings are fantastic and seem very “80s”. Maybe he will be a director like he wants to be and make something like the holy mountain.

One wonders if the Voynich was also created along a similar line of thought.

Occam’s razor says yes, but it’s just a heuristic.

The thing about the VM is that it apparently has statistical properties in its distribution of glyphs that are somewhat consistent with that of common human written languages, and yet were not known at the time.[0]

It's possible that the VM was intended to be meaningless/undecipherable, but that the writer(s) just happened to have come up with a process that both produced these statistical artefacts and managed to elude cryptographers for centuries, but Occam's razor would similarly say that such a process is not the most likely one to have been chosen/invented.

On the other hand, at the word level, "Voynichese" looks very different from natural languages[1], which suggests there is some deliberate artificial process going on. That could be something like encryption, or the writer(s) inventing their own writing system out of necessity (e.g. they spoke a language that didn't yet have a writing system, or there was some esoteric goal that this new writing system achieved).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript#Statistical...

[1] https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2021/can-statis...

What do you think the VM is? What do you think the images depict? The combination of the plants and aesthetics of it make me think it could be a South American language translation.

I clicked on the article thinking to myself: this surelly will be the usual journalistic overreach and clickbait, but let’s see how their choice of weird compares to the Codex Seraphianus.

Turns out that is the book they wrote about. Now I wonder if there are other such weird gems I haven’t had the luck to hear about yet.

I had a similar experience, first thinking "How can they have the audacity to say that, since so many books could be considered the weirdest?", then when I recognized which book it was, I thought "Yep, that's definitely the weirdest!"

> Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes were unavailable for comment.

Well yes, they're dead.

EDIT: look, I'm not a native English speaker, so maybe am I misunderstanding something about how to use the expression "... were unavailable for comment" in general, but I find it very strange to apply it to two people who passed away. It sounds as if the author means to imply that that's no excuse for them to not respond.

> > Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes were unavailable for comment.

> It sounds as if the author means to imply that that's no excuse for them to not respond.

Barthes and Eco are renown for their metatextual essays and stories. They are among the pioneers who reshaped international arts and intellectual discourse through what critics and artists call poststructuralism and postmodernism.

They were and are giants in the world of belles lettres and students and scholars would receive this line and laugh. Maybe even out loud.

No shade on you (or anyone!) for being part of the unending flux that is (Literary) Eternal September.

A literary eternal september is a super provocatively interesting idea, when do you think it happened, who would be pre- and post- participants, and what were its consequences? It's such an evocative metaphor for what happened online, but also for any kind of gentrification or progress.

Haven’t read the article, but being italian and a Serafini aficionado, the funniest thing is that when his book became known worldwide a lot of fakes started to be available (mostly chinese) and he started collecting them just to be surprised about how good they were (just a few to be clear)

My cousins had a copy of this book sitting on the coffee table at their lake house. Being a good bit more affluent than my own family, I remember being too afraid to ask them what it was... good times.

See also Woodring.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Woodring

Is this a manifestation of synesthesia?

Serafini is quoted as saying: "Because it's a memory of, I don't know, ages ago. I was in Salzburg one summer just to follow two or three operas of Mozart. And I don't know why but one day I saw that I was making a different drawing with colors. It was connected with Mozart, but I didn't know that [yet]."

Compare to one of many random descriptions of synesthesia: “In addition to feeling the sounds of musical instruments on her body, Crane sees letters and numbers in brilliant hues. And for her, units of time each have their own shape: She sees the months of the year as the cars on a ferris wheel, with July at the top, December at the bottom.” https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia

Is he drawing what he sees? Any synesthetes available to comment?

This will be super weird, but since it's a request for an illustration of synesthesia on a thread about a mystifying codex, here goes:

The way I write short stories is to "tell it like you remember it," which triggers a kind of stochastic stream of consciousness on the theme, and it maintains its internal logic because one event flows from the next, within a boundary or limit, not unlike a random walk. This makes them seem more real because the honesty isn't in the events as described, but the feeling and plausible logic that generates them. There's a state that with some practice you can kind of summon, and it's a bit musical.

The same goes for music that has shapes, the best way I can describe that is imagine the notes as you hear them are the chaotic edge of an advancing wave but you can get above it and see upstream of them. You're sort of exploring adjacent leaf nodes in a tree made of scales. Key changes and other more complex techniques transfer to branches, etc. For me the colouring is produced by harmonic content of the instrument, where a pure sine wave above a certain frequency would be blue/white and harmonics and distorions and reds begin appear as you add them. The colours are more of an artifact of modulation than frequency.

This made me really interested in fractals because the self similarity resembles that upstream generation of the notes, and I'm playing with the idea now to see if I can validate it. Synthesis removes the barrier of refined playing ability from being able to reason about the shape of music, and treating it as very real shapes but ones you can't see. This is the link to maths, as like music, maths is also the specification of shapes you can't see.

We can say "patterns," but I find that word is too loaded with other meanings and doesn't express the edges and boundaries of the abstractions I (and others) think about, so we can cease to understand "patterns" that are more sophisticated than those that are just objects laid out in 3d space, whereas a shape automatically implies a bounded concept, with "sides" that you know are still a part of it but not visible, and isomorphisms you can relate to it. That intuition allows you to navigate the sense or idea. The shape can also morph or move, which adds additional dimensions to the variables you're thinking about it in terms of.

We're well into the territory of a bit loopy, but if you've read this and get it, I'd wonder if in a few weeks we might find synesthesia is transmissable via writing?

Have you ever seen the Veritasium video on where fractals actually come from in 3D? If not, and since you already thought fractals were fascinating, hold on to your hat.

https://youtu.be/ovJcsL7vyrk

I still look at the pages have a vague sense that the text might not be just gibberish; for a while I wanted to run it through openCV to map all the different characters and do frequency analysis...

The page numbering scheme does make sense though, I once looked at it in detail and I forget exactly what it was, but runs something like base 20

"A variation of based 21", according to Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Seraphinianus

This book holds a special place in my heart. I remember reading about it in the literary magazine The Believer about 15 years ago. At that point in time, the only way to explore the book was to find a rare used copy for a reasonable price. I finally found one (real nice Abbeville First American Ed from 1983) for $250 from Strand Books. I was over the moon. I loved flipping thru it randomly and showing it to friends and acquaintances. When I quit my job I sold it to help pay for school and living expenses. Fortunately, many new editions are available now; making it easier for more people to discover his work.

Amazing book — I spent hours with it back in college, in part to make sense of it, but mostly to enjoy it. Glad to know the author is still at work!

Yes, and he says: "I'm very young, I'm only 72, so we'll see." :-)

Even the 40th year edition is a bit expensive at approx $100. For a similarly weird book at less than half the price I’d suggest this one: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili

For those that enjoy this, you'd probably also love the game Hylics (and its sequel, Hylics 2). Mason Lindroth made what is essentially a claymation fever dream of an RPG.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgNUgeEryCM

Nice.

Can anyone recommend an industrial or engineering design illustration book?

I remember them in my youth, about tractors or airplanes.

This was recommended on HN, and I bought a copy for my kids:

The Way Things Work by Macaulay, David (1988) https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0590429892

My partner had a copy in her second hand bookshop back in the eighties. It was unsellable. You have to have a long view with some books, $300+ now.

I just went to Abe books and the price was $2600.00- Perhaps tied to this article?

Just bought a copy so cool to see this on HN. It has just the right mixture of engineered weirdness for me

https://archive.md/oKgGs

I have a copy of this (not a first edition) and it's an amazing piece of art.

Speaking from personal experience, it makes for an excellent Christmas present.

The script looks similar (to me, someone who understands neither) to Georgian.

Is there an english edition? Or maybe an audiobook on Audible.

It’s already both of those, and also mellifluous dim sum.

Any other books in this genre of weird?

Thanks for the recommendation

found the isekai protagonist

Reply on news.ycombinator.com