"One of those close English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialogue."

Somebody has put the whole Codex Seraphinianus on Flickr (some 350 pages). (Thanks for the heads-up to drjon in the comments yesterday for my March 12 post)
Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini - 1983, US edition. Not that it matters what edition it is as the whole book is written in an alien script of the author's invention. It's an imaginary encyclopedia. As usual with this sort of thing, I arrive to find John Coulthart is there before me:
"The Codex Seraphinianus is unique in placing its invented world centre stage and, even more uniquely, purporting to be a product of that world itself. Its creation seems the inevitable result of a trend of fantasy writing that delights in invention purely for its own sake, particularly invention that goes to great lengths to seem authentic or authoritative, academic even. The great precursor here is Borges’ short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ which relates the invention of a Britannica-style encyclopedia describing with the greatest detail and authority a completely fictional world. Typically for Borges (as for Harrison), the story is also a commentary upon this kind of invention, as well as the effect it can have on our “real” world—for Borges and Harrison reality is more mutable than people like to think. Luigi Serafini takes the whole game a very difficult step further, by creating a complete work which describes his own fictional world in detail, with numerous colour illustrations and the whole written in a completely invented language and alphabet."

This guy's telling you how to get a print copy.

Codex Seraphinianus, Hallucinatory Encyclopedia, an essay on the work by Peter Schwenger.

More, with some other works by the artist.

The story by Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius referred to by John above can be read in English here.
"Some limited and waning memory of Herbert Ashe, an engineer of the southern railways, persists in the hotel at Adrogue, amongst the effusive honeysuckles and in the illusory depths of the mirrors. In his lifetime, he suffered from unreality, as do so many Englishmen; once dead, he is not even the ghost he was then. He was tall and listless and his tired rectangular beard had once been red."
I like Borges' take on the British.
"He and my father had entered into one of those close (the adjective is excessive) English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon dispense with dialog."

anyway, the meat of the matter:
"Now I held in my hands a vast methodical fragment of an unknown planet's entire history, with its architecture and its playing cards, with the dread of its mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody."

and our favourite subject here at campbell blogspot:
"In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres..."
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Michael Evans links me to this piece by Rick Poynor about the various covers over the years on the front of J G Ballard's novel, Crash
Collapsing Bulkheads: The Covers of Crash Mon 12 Mar 2007
"J. G. BALLARD’S Crash tests the limits of the reader’s taste and sympathies in the most profound ways and it has always provoked strong reactions – positive and negative. British novelist Will Self has said, ‘I only have to look at a few paragraphs of Crash to feel I am in the presence of an extreme mind, a mind at the limits of dark imagination.’ He meant this as a commendation. Even Ballard sometimes seemed ambivalent. ‘How many people are there who’d want to read a book like Crash?’ he once asked. ‘Not many.’"

sure enough, there's John Coulthart in the comments
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I just noticed it was Poynor, mentioned more than once in my archives, who started EYE magazine. I noticed it in his biog at The Design Observer site, where I went to read a review by Dan Nadel, the fellow who put together the Art Out of Time book last year. I liked the book, but as for this review of his, I'm starting to think Nadel may be what we call in our house a 'surface dweller'. He knows a lot of names but doesn't leave me with any feeling of increased wisdom.
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Apropos of my talking about The state of reading awhile back:
thislondon.co.uk: 20 March: Schools refuse gifts of 'boring' classics
"Dozens of schools have rejected gifts of free classic books because today's pupils find them too 'difficult' to read, it has emerged.
Around 50 schools have refused to stock literary works by the likes of Jane Austen, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens after admitting that youngsters also find them boring.
The worrying figures were released by the Millennium Library Trust, which donates sets of up to 300 books to schools across the country.
David Campbell, who runs the Trust, also revealed that a further 50 schools had sent back the gifts."

I don't know what to say. Let them eat comics
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Finally, on the subject of cake, and relevant to yesterday's post, Jim Burrows has an illustrated history of the pin-up. What I like most about his site is that at the bottom of his opening page he has negotiated an ad with cheesecake.com: "our gourmet cheesekakes are made entirely by hand, from scratch, and fresh to order. Discover for yourselves why food critics call ours 'The world's most indulgent cheesecake' "