Visual/verbal

Scope and Contents As indicated in a 1985 exhibition catalogue sponsored by the British Arts Council, the idea for a new codex appears in the first notebook as part of the Central School teaching programme: like a Mexican codex in concertina form but 'applied to modern wrapping paper, one side only'. The notion lay dormant for many years but from 1972 its advances and vicissitudes are chronicled in the notebooks. Wright was working at that time on his article 'The Essential Book'. Peguy was the exemplary craftsman: for him 'a book meant a total commitment to social and spiritual truth. . . A book meant writing, editing, printing, proof correcting, publishing and even opening a bookshop in the Rue de la Sorbonne'- the making and the message were inseparable.In an article written in a 1991 issue of Eye magazine on Wright's work, the form of the codex is quite roughly made and free of grand summarising gestures. The chief subject is lunfardo, the slang of the vagrant people of Buenos Aires. This code...

Dates: 1984

Found in: The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry / Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry: Books (unprocessed)

Codex Atorrantis / Wright, Edward., 1984

Item

Identifier: CC-27684-28772

Scope and Contents As indicated in a 1985 exhibition catalogue sponsored by the British Arts Council, the idea for a new codex appears in the first notebook as part of the Central School teaching programme: like a Mexican codex in concertina form but 'applied to modern wrapping paper, one side only'. The notion lay dormant for many years but from 1972 its advances and vicissitudes are chronicled in the notebooks. Wright was working at that time on his article 'The Essential Book'. Peguy was the exemplary craftsman: for him 'a book meant a total commitment to social and spiritual truth. . . . A book meant writing, editing, printing, proof correcting, publishing and even opening a bookshop in the Rue de la Sorbonne'- the making and the message were inseparable.In an article written in a 1991 issue of Eye magazine on Wright's work, the form of the codex - is quite roughly made and free of grand summarising gestures. The chief subject is lunfardo, the slang of the vagrant people of Buenos Aires. This...

Dates: 1984

Found in: The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry / Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry: Books (unprocessed)

Codex Seraphinianus Volumes I & II / Serafini, Luigi., 1981

Item

Identifier: CC-02467-2507

Scope and Contents The artist aka Luigi Serafini writes the text in a flowing yet indecipherable script and illustrates it with vibrantly colored pictures of fantastic creatures, plant life, and machines. This is an extremely unusual presentation for a trade edition book.The Codex is divided into eleven chapters, partitioned into two sections. The first section appears to describe the natural world, dealing with flora, fauna, and physics. The second deals with the humanities, the various aspects of human life: clothing, history, cuisine, architecture and so on. Each chapter seems to treat a general encyclopedic topic. The topics of each separate chapter are as follows: "¢The first chapter describes many alien types of flora: strange flowers, trees that uproot themselves and migrate, etc."¢The second chapter is devoted to the fauna of this alien world, depicting many animals that are surreal variations of the horse. The horse is a hoofed mammal, a subspecies of one of seven extant species of the...

Dates: 1981