lost paws:

"The Codex Seraphinanus: How Mysterious is a Mysterious Text if the Author is Still Alive (and Emailing)?" by Justin Taylor in The Believer.

"One day Dr. Harpold came to class visibly excited. He said he had found a very rare, delicate, and expensive book just sitting on the shelf at the university library. It was typical, he said, because the few libraries that owned a copy of this rare book didn’t know how valuable it had become, so it got shelved with the general collection and subsequently stolen by the first savvy person who came upon it. Harpold had caught our university library’s grievous error and had had it corrected, but not before pulling faculty privilege and checking it out himself. After admonishing us to make sure our hands were clean, he passed it around. “It” was a book called Codex Seraphinianus, by one Luigi Serafini, published in an extremely limited edition in Italy in 1981. The book was an oversize black hardback. The cover art was a vaguely encyclopedic depiction of a man and a woman engaged in successive stages of copulation, then melding together, and finally becoming a single alligator.

When the book came to me I opened to a random page.

I saw a flattish doughnut, possibly made of liquid, and colored a soft, rich red. While the doughnut’s inner ring (i.e., the perimeter of the doughnut’s hole) was perfectly round, the outer ring was irregularly shaped, and appeared more like an elastic membrane. Ladybugs, the same color as the doughnut but also stippled with their standard black dots, emerged from the outer ring and crawled off in all directions. On closer inspection, it didn’t appear that the ladybugs had pushed through the membranous outer ring; no, it seemed more like they were forming from the doughnut material. Parts of the doughnut’s outer ring appeared scooped out, and these inlets seemed to correspond to the various fully formed ladybugs that had walked away..."

"The Codex has many pages filled solely with text; as well, it contains many charts, graphs, and lists. Panning back a bit, we see a book that features all the structural components of an encyclopedia. The ladybug doughnut is one of hundreds of illustrations from the flora and fauna sections of the book (more on this in just a bit), which warrant comparison with Pliny’s Natural History, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, and taxonomical surveys in general. Later in the book, as Serafini shifts his focus to depictions of objects, customs, cultures, modern landscapes, and scenes from life, the referential matrix likewise shifts from Edward Lear–like surrealist naturalism to a mélange including Hieronymus Bosch, the engravings of the great (also heretical, samizdat) alchemical manuals of European history, some Dada, and ’70s pop art."