The Encyclopedia of an Imaginary World, in a Language That Means Nothing

Between 1976 and 1978, in a small apartment in Rome, the architect Luigi Serafini sat down with colored pencils and a constructed alphabet and produced about 360 pages of an illustrated encyclopedia describing a world that does not exist. Plants with rolling-luggage stems. Couples whose embrace turns them, frame by frame, into a crocodile. Fish wearing rainbows. The publisher Franco Maria Ricci issued the result in 1981 as the Codex Seraphinianus, two volumes, sold mostly to people who could not read a word of it.

That was the trick. The script looks like an unfamiliar Indo-European language — flowing, cursive, with consistent ligatures and what reads like punctuation — and for almost thirty years readers tried to decode it. Allan Wechsler and the Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhanski did crack the page numbers: a base-21 system that resets at chapter six. The text itself, though, kept refusing.

The reason came out at an Oxford talk in 2009. Serafini said the writing means nothing. It is asemic. He had composed it the way a child fills a notebook before learning to read — automatic writing that imitates the rhythm and density of language without carrying any. What he wanted, he said, was to give an adult reader the feeling of holding a book they cannot yet understand.

Italo Calvino, who wrote the preface to the 1993 edition, understood the move. The Codex is not a puzzle with a solution withheld; it is a puzzle without one. The pleasure is in the page turning, in being illiterate again. Forty-five years later, nobody has found a hidden grammar, because there is none — and the book has never gone out of print.