These two books are circulating pretty wildly on my social networking site!
One from 1978, one from the early 15th century.
People are falling in love with the fantastic illustrations
Some images are reminiscent to me of hyperspace flora and fauna
Apologies if this has been posted before, did a search...as an illustrator and fan of Jim Woodring who it sometimes evokes, I was surprised I had not heard of it.
They evoke a feeling of excitement and exploration in me
http://www.cetteadressec...Codex.Seraphinianus.pdf
http://archive.org/strea...script#page/n0/mode/2up
Codex Seraphinianus, originally published in 1981, is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world, created by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and written in a strange, generally unintelligible alphabet.
The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–143
, and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.[1][2] The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[3]
The pages of the codex are vellum. Some of the pages are missing, but about 240 remain. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams. Many people have speculated that the writing might be nonsense. However, in 2013, Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester and Damian Zanette of the Bariloche Atomic Centre published a paper documenting their identification of a semantic pattern in the writing; this suggests that the Voynich manuscript is a ciphertext with a message.[4]
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.[5] No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.[6]