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10 Of The Most Bizarre Books Ever Written

If literary history teaches us one thing, it’s that people were just as confused and immature in the Middle Ages as they are now. From unsolvable codes to 13th-century penis doodles in the margins of bibles, history is like an all-encompassing high school cliche that never comes to an end. These books span the course of written history, and they’re all utterly bizarre.

10Codex Seraphinianus

Photo credit: Parigi Books

Written in a language that no one understands and filled with illustrations of surreal, impossible things, Codex Seraphinianus is possibly the strangest encyclopedia in the world. When Italian architect Luigi Serafini published the book in 1981, he presented it as a factual, scientific work. One look at theoutlandish potpourri of images, however, reveals that Codex Seraphinianusis anything but scientific.

The entire book is handwritten, and the illustrations are all hand drawn and colored by Serafini himself, a task that he labored over for two years. Scholars have spent years trying to decipher the book, but the only thing we’ve figured out is that “Seraphinianus” is just a variation of Serafini’s name. As for the book’s language, the “alphabet” has about two dozen characters, and relates to absolutely nothing else humanity has ever created.

9The Book Of Soyga

On March 10, 1552, mathematician John Dee had a conversation with an angel. As a firm believer in both science and the occult, Dee’s life straddled the line between reality and the spirit world. He had already amassed the largest library in London, but it was the anonymous Book of Soyga to which he devoted his most attention.

The book was a conundrum—over 40,000 letters covered its pages, but they were arranged in a haphazard fashion that made little sense. As Dee worked tirelessly to translate the code, he slowly realized that the Soygawas an in-depth list of magical incantations. The biggest mystery of all was contained in the last 36 pages. Each page was devoted to a table of letters—a code which Dee never managed to crack. So he decided to go beyond our world for the answer.

On a trip to continental Europe, Dee enlisted the help of a spiritual medium to summon the Archangel Uriel. Dee opened the conversation by asking if the book meant anything. Uriel replied that the Book of Soyga had been given to Adam in the Garden of Eden. When Dee asked for help translating the tables, Uriel replied that he didn’t have the necessary clearance; only Archangel Michael knew the secret.

Dee never managed to reach Michael, and after his death, the book was lost for nearly 500 years. There are now two known copies of the Book of Soyga—one in the British Library and one in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The code is still unsolved.

8Prodigiorum Ac Ostentorum Chronicon

Otherwise known as the Chronicle of Portents and Prophecies, this book was written in 1557 by the French humanist Conrad Lycosthenes. Laid out like an encyclopedia, the book transcribes otherworldly happenings since the time of Adam and Eve. But while the encyclopedic Codex Seraphinianuswas a book of fantasy, Lycosthenes’s Chronicle was relatively factual—at least in the sense that it covered actual reports. Sandwiched in between well-documented disasters, floods, and meteor showers (including Halley’s comet) are descriptions of sea monsters, UFOs, and various biblical themes.

The Chronicle was incredibly detailed and contained over 1,000 original woodcut illustrations of the phenomenon described. There are still several copies floating around, usually on rare book websites, where they sell forseveral thousands of dollars.

7The Ripley Scrolls

When Isaac Newton began delving into the mystical world of alchemy, he turned largely to the works of Sir George Ripley, a 15th-century writer who created some of the longest-lasting works on the subject. His most enduring is without a doubt the enigma that has come to be known as the Ripley Scrolls.

The scrolls are a picture-book recipe for creating the elusive philosopher’s stone, a fictional material supposedly able to turn lead into gold. Although the original version of the Ripley Scrolls has been lost to time, a handful of artists in the 16th century created reproductions of the alchemical work, and 23 of those remain. Each one is slightly different, since all the reproductions were made by hand. The largest scroll is a massive 6 meters (19.5 ft) long, with a dense patchwork of illustrations covering the majority of it.

6The Story Of The Vivian Girls

The entire time Henry Darger was working as a janitor in downtown Chicago, nobody knew that he was secretly writing one of the most bizarre and intricate storybooks of all time. When he died in 1973, Darger’s landlord discovered a 15,000-page manuscript entitled The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion.

The book was immense, a sprawling epic composed of more than nine million words and over 300 watercolor illustrations, most of which were made by juxtaposing images from magazines and newspapers and tracing over them. Some of the final illustrations were laid out on massive sheets of paper over 3 meters (10 ft) wide. Nobody really knows how long Darger worked on the book, although it’s believed to have been decades. He lived in the same cramped, single-room apartment for over 40 years, and he never spoke a word of his lifelong dream to anybody.