The Codex Seraphinianus was written and illustrated by Italian artist, Luigi Serafini during the late 1970s. The book, whose overall tone is one of playfulness, is 400-odd pages long and consists of illustrations of a fantasy world, together with "explanatory" text in a made-up writing system.
The illustrations are often a sort of parody of things in our world, for example: bleeding fruit; a plant that grows into roughly the shape of a chair and is subsequently made into one; a lovemaking couple that metamorphoses into a reptile; etc.
The false writing system appears modelled on ordinary Western-style writing systems (left-to-right writing in rows; an alphabet with uppercase and lowercase; probably a separate set of symbols for writing numerals) but is much more curvilinear. It seems to have been designed to appear, but not actually be, meaningful.
This is a rare and expensive book, so it may be easier to find at a public library.
