This thread reminded me of this weird art project I remember reading about. It was a book who’s concept was that it was all about some weird alien culture. It has some notable pictures, one of which is a man standing on what almost looks like a small piece of asphalt, with a round shield and a toga of some kind. Also, ther were round things on his ears. There was also a series of an alligator morphing into something. I think it was the somethingorother codex.
Also, from my understanding (which might be 100% wrong,) there weren’t a lot of copies made, so there’s probably no way I could own it, right? But I at least need to know the name so it will stop bugging me.
Codex Seraphinianus, by Luigi Serafini. As you rightly recalled, it’s a super rare book, but really fascinating. It’s entirely written in a script that Serafini made up, and it hasn’t been deciphered yet (the numbering system for the pages has, though).
Was it really all that rare? I checked it out of the city library when I was in high school (admittedly a city of ~ 100,000 but it wasn’t considered too precious for them to let me take it out).
I own a copy. I bought the Abbeville Press edition back in '84 with money from my first job. It cost $75, IIRC, which was a lot of money for me then. I was staggered to read that copies are fetching $500 to $1000 on Amazon.