Re: Codex Seraphinianus

Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>
> Doug Ewell wrote:
> > Neither Bodley's message nor Geist's Web site mention the
> > year, or even the century, in which the Codex was written.
>
> As far as I can remember, it dates back to the middle of the 1980's.
>
> It was probably 1984 or 1985: the publishing house (Franco Maria Ricci,
> Milan) was on my way from the Far Eastern Languages school that I attended
> to the underground station, and when I first saw the book in FMR bookshop I
> was probably on my first or second year of Chinese.
>
> It surprises me that someone really considers it "a book": I have always
> seen it used only as luxury ornament in the apartments of the Milanese
> bourgeoisie. :-)

The American edition is New York: Abbeville, 1983; the title page,
copyright page, and jackect copy are typset in English, and all the rest
is presumably identical to the 1981 Italian original.

I think I remember seeing the Italian in the window at Rizzoli, and even
back then I couldn't afford art book prices, so it was probably
remaindered at Kroch & Brentano's in Chicago. (These days I try to
remove discount price stickers from the outside and stick them on the
reverse of the jacket, for a record. Or maybe it was shrink-wrapped with
an un-rescuable sticker.)

I think it does contain sufficient material for decipherment, including
displays of the alphabet and some pages of paradigms. The simplest
hypothesis is that it's Italian written in a substitution cipher.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...