Jordan and the Lost Illustrations of Etimologiario

A while back, I posted a blog about a book I had found that contained illustrations by Serafini (here is the link, if you’re really that bored: Etimologiario Post #1 ).  Due to my laziness, I never got around to adding the promised follow-up post with all of the illustrations in it.  A quick recap: the book is called Etimologiario by Maria Sebregondi and published by Longanesi, the same publisher who put out the Pulcinellopeida (Piccola).  It was originally published in 1988, and it was reprinted by a different publisher in 2003, although I don’t know if that new edition has the Serafini illustrations or not.  The book is a small 16mo paperback, a far cry from the deluxe publication of the Codex or even the large-format Pulcinellopedia.  I have sent a couple excerpts to an Italian-speaking friend of a friend, although I haven’t heard anything back, so I still have very little idea what this book is about.  This is familiar Serafini territory, however, since nothing he has ever done has ever had any sort of text to explain the image.  And, in typical Serafini fashion, these illustrations speak for themselves with the same tortured internal logic his fans would expect.

They are recognizable as Serafini illustrations at first glance, using the same pencil technique as the Pulcinellopedia, with only the cover illustration being in color.  It is interesting that this book and his other illustration work has pretty much been swept under the rug, while all the other facets of his artistic output have been chronicled in various design anthologies and the Luna-PAC Serafini book.  I’m still holding out for a copy of In the Penal Colony, but that’s not something I expect to find anytime soon.

Anyway, enough rambling… here are the illustrations, which – to my knowledge – are making their grand debut on the internet.  Enjoy!

This post contains something so rare that everything that has ever existed before is now abundant…

What could possibly be that rare? A comment about the Codex Seraphinianus by the man himself, Luigi Serafini, that’s what. Serafini scholars (all two of them) generally consider Serafini to be a reticent man, content to put his work out into the world and let people form their own conclusions about it. (See, for example, Justin Taylor’s Codex article in which Serafini coquettishly dodges Taylor’s request to interview him.) However, in some sort of life-imitating-cliché, I finally managed to unearth a real, actual, written (well, translated, most likely) quotation by Serafini about the Codex only after I had stopped looking. (And yes, I plan to blab on about it at length before transcribing the quotation itself, which is actually pretty short.)

The funny part is that I found this rare gem in a book that’s not rare at all. In fact, I picked it up on Amazon Marketplace for $6, and although there are less copies of this particular book available online than the Codex itself, it doesn’t seem like a terribly difficult book to find. The book is called New Italian Design (edited by Nally Bellati, whoever that is), and it’s an anthology of Italian designers, tucked amongst which you’ll find Serafini. I bought the book mainly because it was so cheap, and I’ve been feeling lately (rightly, as it turns out) that if I simply hoard everything that has anything to do with the man, I’m bound to find some interesting stuff.

Of course, the Serafini-related content of the book is fantastic (including a jug shaped like his “King Botto” character, who is most prominently featured in the new introduction to the Codex, a two-headed horse teapot, headless goblin wine bottles, and one of the most uncomfortable-looking chairs I’ve ever seen). Worth the $6 I paid for the book for sure.

What I didn’t expect to find, however, was the two-page introduction/bio. The bio treats Serafini mostly as a designer (although it concludes, “For Serafini is first and foremost a poet and a thinker who not only mediates between the world of dreams and that of reality but also manages to blur the division between the two”), and my amateur detective theory is that, since the audience for this book probably had never heard of the Codex, Serafini didn’t see too much harm in going on the record about it a little bit. In other words, here, Serafini isn’t the “Codex guy” that most people know him as- although the few pages devoted to him are the high point of my reading this book, the book certainly doesn’t make a point of elevating him above any of the other 40 or so designers it features. Having written the Codex is merely a feather in his cap, an additional credential that bolsters his status as a visionary designer. Taking this line of reasoning a little further, this book showcases Serafini’s commercial pursuits- many of his designs are manufactured, rather than composed solely by him (although there are some prototypes present). It therefore stands to reason that, while he might playfully turn away an interested Codex scholar like Justin Taylor, he doesn’t mind waxing eloquent about the Codex when it can make him seem like a desirable asset for a manufacturer looking for striking new designs.

So, on to the main event: so far, this is the only published comment I’ve seen Serafini make about the Codex. I don’t doubt that there is vastly more available in Italian newspapers and magazines (not to mention design books, etc.), although this is all I or anyone I know who has researched the Codex has found in English. And it’s here and only here on this here muthafuckin blog. Enjoy!

On the Codex:

“I’d call it a dream in writing,” he explains with a whimsical smile, “an image of something that has been deformed, and yet is nevertheless recognizable. The writing itself is vaguely reminiscent of Arabic script, although it is entirely the fruit of my imagination. And the strange thing is that it sort of looks realistic, intelligible. In fact a few people have actually studied it in some detail, and have discovered that there are certain shapes, certain signs that are recurrent and that give the impression of real words and a kind of syntax [my emphasis, meant to convey the "holy shit" I emitted when I read this part].”

On his work in general:

“My work really derives from a sort of vision that there and then seems to be completely autonomous. It’s usually only sometime later that I begin to realize that certain memories and recollections spurred that vision into being. On occasions, these images may also act as antennae for something that’s in the air. When this happens they’re more like visions of things still to come.”

On leaving Rome to travel to the US in the 70’s:

“At the outset, I was knocked out by the whole experience. That leap from the seventeenth century to the year 2000 was almost more than I could cope with. I knew no one there, and I just started traveling, almost obsessively, all over the place. And when I did get back to Rome, I couldn’t sit still. I set off again, for the MIddle East, as far as Babylon. And then for equatorial Africa, where I was mistaken for a spy and flung into jail for several days. All these experiences were bound to find their way into my work sooner or later.”

On his “current” projects (ca. 1990):

“At present I must confess that I’m not very pleased with how I divide my time between my various activities. I tend to get asked to do things and am unable to say no. So then I find myself involved, but not with much enthusiasm. I hope to get myself a bit better organized in the future. [These] are the years of my maturity, I suppose you’d call them. I’m aware of a certain fullness, like in the mid-afternoon when all colors seem particularly intense and nature exhibits a richness that is only visible before the first breeze of evening.”

I’ve Never Been More Excited About a Book I Won’t be Able to Understand

I’m happy to see that the Serafini article I wrote is the most-viewed page on this blog… I worked hard enough on it, so it’s pretty gratifying that people are taking the time to read it (well, I’m sure people aren’t reading ALL of it, but still). Anyway, for those that didn’t make it to the end (or for those who skipped to the pictures), I ended by mentioning an edition of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony illustrated by Serafini that I don’t expect ever to find. Well, since I finished that article, I’ve been spending a lot of time researching books that Serafini appears in, in hopes of assembling a wide-ranging collection of his work. His art has appeared in a handful of Italian art books (books that are available on Abebooks, although they’re pretty expensive to have shipped from Europe, especially with the Euro so frustratingly strong right now), and I think I even found a collection of short stories that he contributed to… also, various compilations of modern interior designers feature Serafini (I picked up one published in the US for $6 on Amazon the other day).

If I were going to separate Serafini books into tiers (as collectors often do), I’d classify “A” items as those written and illustrated by Serafini (such as the Codex and the Pulcinellopedia) or books dedicated to him (such as the Luna-Pac book), “B” items as books featuring his illustrations throughout (such as the vaporous In the Penal Colony), and “C” items as anthologies in which he appears. I’m fairly certain that I’ve collected all the “A” items, but a recent discovery thickened the plot significantly as to the “B” items… (As for “C” items, I’m sure there are a bunch of Italian books I’ve never heard of that he appears in… if I could find something pre-Codex, however, I’d be ecstatic.) An unfamous author (at least to English-speakers) named Maria Sebregondi published a book called Etimologiario in 1988, and it features a bunch of Serafini illustrations. The book is on its way to me from Italy, and I’ll post more about it when I get it in a couple weeks. From what I’ve seen, the illustrations are in pencil, similar to the Pulcinellopedia. Really interesting, however, is that the book is apparently a deconstrution of written language, which is a subject about which Serafini would seem to have a lot to say.

Like the title says, I’m in the dark until I find a friendly Italian person who can translate some of the book for me, but I’m still pretty damn excited about it. I mean, I’ve spent hours researching Serafini, and I had no idea this book existed. It’s listed at various websites, but never with Serafini as the illustrator, which is why I was never aware of it. Anyway, stay tuned for more, including as many pictures as I have the patience to upload to Flickr.

The Luigi Serafini Article is Here…

UPDATE: Okay, so the article is finally done. I posted it on a new page so it doesn’t get lost in the crushing flow of my rambling. I managed to drum up a (as in 1) hit for it by adding a link to the Codex’s Wikipedia page. I think it deserves to be linked there as much as anything else on that page, although I imagine it will get deleted fairly soon…

Jeez, the way I’ve been hyping this up, you’d think I actually had something worth your time! Alas, I don’t. But, what I do have is 9500 words of pure pontification and waxy eloquence about my favorite artist and his books. Self-deprecation aside, I am proud of this, and I have been working on it for the past two weeks, rather than writing other blog entries that might actually bring some traffic to this site (5 views in the last 4 days = so popular I could cry).

The article is written, I just need to upload it to WordPress and work in all the pictures. Not to pat myself on the back or anything, but I’m pretty sure that it contains a) the most detailed publishing history of Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus currently available in English, and b) the only in-depth analysis of Serafini’s Pulcinellopedia (Piccola) currently available in English. So, hopefully it’s worth your time and your while… it will be unveiled sometime this weekend, and next week, I’ll get to work on the backlog of other entries that I put off while working on this monster.

Another trip to the well: An Update

Evidently, I’m not as dumb as I look. The “more common” edition of the Codex sold for $280… $20 MORE than the much more difficult-to-find first American edition I bought on eBay two nights ago. I will have a huge post about the Codex coming soon (I need to really let it ruminate… I’m going for 2000 words!), comparing all the different editions, with tons of details that no one cares about. But, suffice it to say for now, I can’t believe it sold for that much, especially to a French guy who could probably find it for its published price of 89 Euros at an art bookstore somewhere. (Or maybe it’s rarer than I think, and I’m just incredibly resourceful.) Anyway, I need to figure out what to do with the first-American edition before I buy another copy of the 2006 Codex- the cheapest copy on Abebooks is $650, which makes it the most valuable book in my collection (if you use the “cheapest copy on Abebooks” as a reliable measure of the value). Do I sell it? Sell other stuff to keep it? I’ll be up all night at this rate.

Since I’m sure people only read this blog for the [book] porn pictures, here’s the title page of the American Codex (the only one in any edition that is illustrated)…

As for the Serafini book, it sold for $200 in about 5 hours… even better than the first copy I sold. I knew I was onto something with that. Although, of course I immediately bought another one to sell, and after all this gloating, I’m sure I’ll end up getting $40 for it.

And on to the Ryden stuff… I’m stuck waiting out the current state of the market before I try to sell my expensive items. I lost money on Quadratum, one of his microportfolios, and I haven’t tried to sell the Artist Proof yet (I took it to some bookstores, but they didn’t offer me enough for it). I still have a later-edition microportfolio and a signed first-edition of his book that I’m dealing with… so it might be a while. And once it’s gone, I’m going to have to find a new market niche to research. Do the 2 people that read this blog have any hot leads for me?

Carpet Bombing the FMR-ket

One of the interesting things about the used book market is how different channels operate seemingly independently of each other. On the one hand, you have the eBay channel, which changes in dynamic sometimes weekly, and on the other hand, there’s the retail/Abebooks channel that operates on its own logic. The lack of cross-talk here is really interesting to me, and it’s the main way I convinced myself I could make money at this little game. It started with a couple FMR books I sold for a profit at Moe’s Books in Berkeley… but first, as you must’ve expected from this blog, 2 long-winded levels of background.

First, a little bit about FMR. The acronym stands for Franco Maria Ricci, the name of the publisher. Ricci famously describes getting his start in publishing after seeing a manual of typefaces by Giambattista Bodoni and having the same reaction that he assumes Stradivarius must’ve had after seeing a handcrafted violin for the first time: he knew immediately that he wanted to be a publisher. His books are really over the top luxury-wise, as is his magazine, the self-proclaimed Most Beautiful Magazine in the World. I first heard of FMR when I became interested in the Codex Seraphinianus, since Ricci “discovered” Serafini and was the first to publish his book. Through researching FMR’s “Signs of Man” series (dedicated to unknown or underappreciated artists), I decided to start collecting them. They are published in Italian, French, and 8 volumes in English… the ones that never made it into English are some of my favorites, including Zotl, a catalog of bizarre paintings of animals by an artist (Aloys Zotl) who was never formally trained and had no stylistic development whatsoever during his career. Or Fini Mundi, a collection of 18th-century paintings of the apocalypse with commentary by Borges. Typically, these books (many are still available new) go for $300-$400. All of them are bound in silk, many are in clamshell library cases, and the covers feature gold-stamped Bodoni type and pastedown color illustrations. They are printed on handmade Italian paper (all FMR books in the series except the Codex feature a distinctive light-blue tint), individually numbered (usually in editions of 2000-4000) and signed by Ricci.

Normally, these books would go for slightly less than their Abebooks prices when they showed up on eBay. $200-$300 was common for the English ones, although you’d often see really beat-up copies of some of them end up selling for $100 or so. Then (now we’re at the 2nd level of background), an interesting thing happened. In June, a woman in Michigan who was primarily a dealer of horse saddles bought an enormous stock of FMR books in an estate sale. And they (and by “they,” I mean the English FMR titles) just started showing up, over and over again. Demand stayed high for a really long time, and they were still selling for over $100 apiece well into the fall. But she just kept selling them and selling them. I’d get outbid at the last second with a high bid of $85, and then I’d win the book 3 weeks later for $60. I ended up buying a lot of them, because I thought their resale potential was high. Moe’s paid out $150 for a copy of Congress of the World by Borges that I got for $50. They planned to sell it for $450, which made it a great deal for both of us (although it’s still on their shelves right now, so I may have come out ahead there). I still have a few, because I like them, and I think that the price will go back up eventually. Maybe.

This brings me to the point of this blog: I watch the eBay market fluctuate independently of the retail market all the time. Things happen (like Porterhouse’s Ryden sale) that flood “rare” product on eBay, and prices go way down, and then that stock dries up, and prices come back up. For one reason or another, the same thing happened with Bukowski books last summer. But this FMR business is starting to spill over, due to the sheer volume of product released into the market. The seller has sold some pretty rare items, and those have fetched accordingly high prices, but she has a seemingly endless supply of the English FMR “Signs of Man” titles, as well as a few other random ones. It’s reached the point where everyone who wants one has one, but she’s still selling them, for less and less as time goes on. Now, books that popped up on Abebooks for $400 last summer are showing up from the same booksellers for $125. It has me wondering how long the market for the books is going to take to rebound, or if it ever will. Since I’m fairly new to the business side of this whole thing, I don’t really have any way to gauge it. A temporary glut will drop prices for a month or two, but what about a year-long assault on demand by oversupply? Prices on Abebooks don’t change very quickly, because they sit in a database that probably doesn’t get updated that often, so when they come down, I assume that they stay that way for a while. I’m wondering if in a year or two, the market will have flipped such that the books are actually going for more money on eBay than they’re listed on Abebooks. (You’d think this would be impossible that people would work to pay more for it on eBay than they could just snatch it up on an e-commerce site, but it happens all the time.)

What I find interesting about the FMR price assault is that, more than any other books I have in my collection, these books, at least from an aesthetic perspective, deserve their high prices. It’s not like a cheap paperback that just so happens to be really rare and gets its price that way- it’s clear that these books were not at all cheap to produce (Japanese silk, handmade paper, all the trimmings). Since the art reproductions can’t be printed directly on the paper, all of the illustrations are printed on glossy paper and “hand-tipped” into the books (how long this must’ve taken for each edition of 3000 is pretty staggering). You hold them- even smell them- and it’s clear that they’re expensive books. They’re designed to look luxurious on some rich couple’s $5000 coffee table. And the content is pretty good too. Ricci prided himself on pairing art monographs with interesting texts, and a lot of books have some neat literature in them. There’s the book of Tarot cards, which sounds dumb on the surface, until you learn that it’s actually a book of the oldest surviving deck of medieval Tarots, made back when Tarot was a parlor game, rather than a method of fortune-telling. Alongside the Tarot illustrations is a novella by Italo Calvino that creates mini-narratives based on the cards. Then there’s the book of paintings by Arcimboldo (the Spanish painter who painted heads made up of flowers or vegetables – composite heads, as they’re called), with an essay by Roland Barthes. (Even though I’m not in grad school anymore and don’t really read literary criticism, there’s something about Barthes that I still get a kick out of. No one can make something seem as interesting as Barthes… I never really cared one way or the other for Arcimboldo until I read Barthes’s essay on him, and now I think he’s incredible.) For Justine, I picked up a collection of photos of children by Lewis Carroll, accompanied by his letters to them (it’s very strange, to say the least).

I bought a bunch of them at one point when the seller contacted me privately about a bulk purchase, and I managed to turn a good profit on them, although I’ve still got a couple left and I’ve exhausted the resources I have to sell them (which often happens when eBay is off limits). I guess I’ll just have to wait a few years and see if the prices ever recover from the flood.

Another trip to the well…

Hello, blog readers… if you’ve found this page, then you’re officially bored, and that certainly won’t change over the course of the time you spend here. I have another blog on Myspace that contains many irreverent ramblings about things I see and do, so I decided to focus this WordPress page on my near-obsessive book collecting habit.

Quick note: the web address of this blog (“Chance Press”) refers to the small press I one day hope to start with the lovely, extremely talented Justine Rubyred… but that’s a few years into the future, so for now, you get this.

Tonight, I took a gamble and bought a couple books by Luigi Serafini, my favorite artist and the subject of a mild global cult following. Serafini is the author of the Codex Seraphinianus, a bizarre encyclopedia of an alien (alternate?) world, written in a totally made-up script. Google it and enjoy the fuck out of yourself in the process. There are 4 major editions of the Codex: the original, published in 2 volumes in 1981 and signed by Serafini (goes for around $4000 and up), the first-US, published in 1983 (released concurrently with the first German and first Dutch editions), the 2nd edition, published in 1993(with additional material and a neat-o preface-o by Italo Calvino), and the 3rd edition, published in 2006.

In 2007, an Italian art gallery held a Serafini retrospective, and they released a really nicely designed catalog, complete with tons of essays I can’t read, because I’m too stupid to have realized that I would someday be smitten with an Italian artist and would then buy a catalog of a retrospective of his work at an Italian art gallery complete with tons of essays that I would want to read, and I never learned Italian. Still, I had to have the book as soon as I heard of it, especially because I thought it might contain a picture of Serafini’s painting of little children feeding wind-up toy alligators (it does). The book was $90 in the US, which seemed inflated, except that it is published at 44 Euros (god I hate Euros right now), and with shipping from Europe, that seemed about what I would have to pay for it if I tried to convince some Italian bookstore to send it to me.

I got it, and it didn’t disappoint me, although I started to think that I could turn it around on eBay for a profit. I mean, there is literally only one bookstore in the US that imports it (and despite the obvious website, www.artbooks.com, it’s not very well known and doesn’t even advertise a catalog on AbeBooks), and there is a decent Serafini following here that would want this book. It has momentarily occurred to me that I’m taking advantage of people by finding something cheap and reselling it for more (not to mention the fact that I could be accused of fleecing the nice bookseller offering this book at a fairly reasonable price), but I decided that I should be entitled to at least SOME form of compensation for the ridiculous amount of time I spend researching used books online… I mean, if no one else seems to be able to find this book online and would rather buy it on eBay, who am I to stop them from doing so?

So the book ended up selling for $170, which exceeded my expectation. I of course bought a replacement copy, but tonight I decided to take another trip to the well and buy a 3rd copy that I will again try to sell on eBay. We’ll see if the magic happens again. God damn this blog must be boring! Well, onward and upward…

I also bought a copy of the 3rd edition of the Codex Seraphinianus for $145 (again a fairly reasonable price). This one is more common to find, but I’m still going to try to sell it for profit, or at least to get my money back. My main interest in buying it is a booklet that supposedly ships with the book called “Decodex”. Again supposedly, this booklet contains Serafini’s own remarks, allegedly the first that he has ever issued about this book. It will be in Italian, but in case I meet an Italian who gets a tingling sensation when thinking about translating books for strangers, I feel that I need to have it. Plus, the 3rd edition contains even more plates that weren’t in the first two editions, so who knows… I may like it so much I have to keep it and buy another one to try and sell. And this is how it goes. I’ll probably spend about 10x the amount of time it took you to read this blog mulling over that very question.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the gripping saga so far. I guarantee you that it will continue and I promise that it will never become more interesting.