2008, 384 pp. In 2013, Rizzoli published a second revised edition, as well as limited, signed, and numbered "deluxe" edition. They printed 300 copies in Italian and 300 in English: Milano: Rizzoli, 2013, 396 pp., In 2016, a 2017 Codex Seraphinianus wall calendar was published by Universe Publishing. Universe Publishing, 2016, 24 pp., Rizzoli published a 40th anniversary edition of Codex Seraphinianus with some additional material in 2021. Milano: Rizzoli, 2021, 416pp., Reception Baird Searles, in Asimov's Science Fiction (April 1984), says "the book lies in the uneasy boundary between surrealism and fantasy, given an odd literary status by its masquerade as a book of fact". Douglas Hofstadter, in Metamagical Themas, finds many of the illustrations "grotesque and disturbing" and others "extremely beautiful and visionary". He says the book "seems [to some people] to glorify entropy, chaos, and incomprehensibility". American journalist Jim Dwyer finds that the work is an early critique of the Information Age. If the encyclopedia tends to fix the knowledge of a certain era, in Serafini's "fantaencyclopedia" nothing is solid. According to Italo Calvino, the skeleton is "the only nucleus of reality which endures in the same way in this world full of interchangeable shapes". With this ironic and involving variability, the Codex Seraphinianus keeps in touch with the psychic area and attempts to describe a "contradictory world's cataloguing of halfway shapes". See also The Voynich manuscript, an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system from the early 15th century A Book from the Sky, a similar book by Chinese artist Xu Bing, consisting of new, meaningless Chinese characters, printed from hand-carved blocks Fantastic Planet, a French film consisting of similar abstract imagery After Man and Man After Man by Dougal Dixon - books illustrating speculated future zoology and anthropology, respectively. References External links Another Green World: The Codex Seraphinianus, by John Coulthart Peter Schwenger's Codex Seraphinianus, Hallucinatory Encyclopedia "The Worlds of Luigi Serafini" by Jordan Hurder Curiosities - Codex Seraphinianus by Bud Webster at F&SF "Codex Seraphinianus Resource and Analysis Site" by Kane X. Faucher "Codex Seraphinianus: A New Edition of the Strangest Book In the World" on Dangerous Minds Look Inside the Extremely Rare Codex Seraphinianus, the Weirdest Encyclopedia Ever. Wired 1981 books Artists' books Manuscripts written in undeciphered writing systems Fantastic art False documents Encyclopedias of fictional worlds Surrealist works Fictional languages