5 of the strangest books ever written

“If you would not be forgotten / As soon as you are dead and rotten / Either write things worth reading / or do things worth the writing.” This rhythmic quip comes from the 1738 edition of Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack. It must have really spoken to Franklin, as he was a fellow with several books and well-publicized achievements to his name (and many pen names). In fact, many people have taken this advice to heart over the centuries, for good or ill.

However, some books and their authors aren’t remembered for being “things worth reading.” Some are remembered for being so odd, so offbeat, so utterly bizarre that one can barely understand them (assuming they can be read at all). In this article, we’ll look at five incredibly strange books and why they are so fascinating even today.

Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini (1981)

The Codex Seraphinianus is the youngest book on the list, yet it reads like something that is either centuries old or has slipped through a temporal crack from the far future.

An “encyclopedia from another world,” the Codex contains an array of strange, surrealistic drawings. These depict things like fish with giant eyes on their sides, double rhinos, and lovers slowly merging into an alligator. Serafini found his drawings to be so alien that he decided that not just any language could be used to explain them, so he developed his own.

The language is, of course, also from this alternative universe of pure imagination. The text is purposefully untranslatable; Serafini has repeatedly explained that the writing is merely an image and has no hidden meaning. Reading it gives the experience of being a preliterate child browsing a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can neither fully comprehend the pictures nor turn to the words for help. Even the page numbers are an oddity, using a system designed around base 21.

While pinning down exactly what the book is about is difficult, the pictures do provide some context. The first half describes a curious reality, with chapters on its fantastical physics, mechanics, and plant and animal life. The second half focuses on the equivalent of “human” life in this universe.

You can, well, not exactly “read,” the text here. If you’re looking for something similar, A Book from the Sky by Chinese artist Xu Bing is a historiography written in faux Chinese.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)

The next book on this list isn’t a cryptic manuscript from an alien world, but an example of modernism. It took Joyce 17 years to write Finnegans Wake, and the finished novel exhibits incredibly dense and obscure writing.

Like several other entries on this list, Finnegans Wake isn’t written in a real language. Well, not exactly. Most of the words are recognizably English, but Joyce manipulates them for his own ends. The book’s paragraphs feature odd word combinations, snippets of other languages, and, shall we say, bold choices of onomatopoeias. In many cases, this hybridized language is used to make increasingly obscure references to religion, mythology, literature, philosophy, and other texts. Consider when Hamlet is deemed “Camelot, prince of dinmurk,” and you’ll have an idea of how far you can throw the rabbit hole.

Summarizing the book is difficult, as there is no universal agreement on the plot. Several significant events are referenced but not shown. The references then change details to the point where the original event is left unknowable. Some chapters are so complex that it is difficult to agree where they are taking place.

There is a little more agreement about the cast. The story appears to center around the Earwicker family — that is, unless they are actually variations of other characters. There may be two narrators or not. It is also possible to read the text as having a few primary characters who are constantly changing their names, appearance, and day jobs. You can choose the interpretation you prefer.

The strangeness of the text has impacted its reviews since it was first serialized as “fragments from Work in Progress.” Even Joyce’s friends and colleagues were baffled. The book’s full publication in 1939 did little to improve its reputation. While it enjoys better reviews today, there are still a considerable number of detractors.

For the curious, the text can be found at this link. Good Luck.

The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell (1971)

Our next entry is a unique collection of recipes for sparking chaos collected in hopes of preserving classic American values. The Anarchist Cookbook is more famous for its hype than anything in it, but the controversy has helped spread its legend. Ostensibly, the book is an “instruction manual” for making things like bombs, drugs, and phreaking devices. (For anyone born after 2000, phreaking devices manipulated the routing signals of landline telephones so users could make free phone calls.)

A quick read of the introduction reveals that Powell had little understanding of anarchist philosophy, nor a grasp of who might be interested in the text. He argues the book is for the “silent majority” — which he imagined to be anarchists — to use against fascist, capitalist, and communist threats. Exactly how that was supposed to work out isn’t described convincingly.

Its “recipes” aren’t much better than the philosophy. The first section focuses on drugs and includes a recipe for bananadine, a hoax psychedelic purportedly made from smoking banana peels. The tall tale is based on a misunderstanding of a Donovan song, one the book repeats as fact (while also suggesting that smoking the drug could be useful in the event of civil unrest … somehow?). The recipe itself is equally absurd, calling for 15 pounds of bananas.

Later sections include instructions for making bombs and weapons. These are generally considered the most dangerous parts of The Anarchist Cookbook, but they are wildly unreliable, too. Calling them “Darwin Awards Fast Tracks” may be more suitable. Of course, anybody who tries to build a wiretapping device designed by the same person who advised them to get high on banana peels probably has it coming.

At this point, it likely won’t surprise you to learn that Powell wrote the book as a teenager. He has since disowned it, but because he failed to secure the copyright, it remains available over his objections, having sold more than two million copies. Various government agencies have also attempted to find a legal basis to ban the book but to no avail.

Since its publication, The Anarchist Cookbook has been associated with a number of crimes, including the Columbine school shooting and several abortion clinic bombings.

For obvious reasons, we won’t link to a copy here. Besides, there are better things to do with your time, like reading the next book on our list.

Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright (1939)

A full book in this lingua franca lacking an “E” may sound absurd, but it is not. Wright did it in that annum at which point Nazis did attack Poland with his book Gadsby.

This fully lucid story, which has a word count making it a full, robust publication, follows John Gadsby as his small town, Branton Hills, slumps. Gadsby draws his town’s youth to a civic organization. An anonymous narrator informs us of Branton Hills’ history and, as Gadsby triumphs, its cultivation.

It starts during Taft’s Administration and shows things such as WWI, Prohibition, and a span of chronology that did roar — all using that particular constraint. Did this limit things? Uh-huh. And its circumlocution is conspicuous. Still, many famous sayings turn up in its lipograms. Two you may know: “Music hath charms to calm a wild bosom” and “A charming thing is a joy always.”

Initially hard to publish, Wright found a vanity publishing company for that task. Gadsby’s initial print was its last until not long ago. Fans of this book, mostly a scholarly class, now find high costs if hoping to grasp an original book. Unpopular, but known and with acclaim, Gadsby is an oddity you may wish to study. Its copyright is still ongoing, but you may find just-out prints for low costs.

(Oy, that was laborious — and only a fraction of Gadsby’s 50,000 E-free words!)

Voynich Manuscript (early 15th century)

Any list of peculiar literature is going to include the Voynich manuscript and for good reason. This book is a trip.

Exactly what it’s about remains a mystery. While it has the hallmarks of either an alchemy or medical textbook, not all of the illustrations of plants can be identified as existing species. Some pages have illustrations on astronomical and astrological subjects, once fundamental in medicine, but other sections depict rosettes, therapeutic communal baths, and other fantastical drawings.

Figuring out why the plants and other drawings seem off is made even more difficult by the inability to read the book. Its script, named Voynichese, sports many bizarre features. It follows certain laws of natural linguistics, such as Zipf’s Law, while ignoring others, such as having a very low natural entropy value (the tendency of words to be more similar the closer they are to one another on a page).

So, Voynichese does behave like a language, but an unnatural and indecipherable one. It is likely a constructed language, like Klingon or Esperanto, or a coded version of an existing language. This is further complicated by a few words of Latin and High German sprinkled throughout the margins.

And its history is almost as odd as the manuscript itself. The vellum has been radiocarbon dated to the early 15th century, but the first records of the Voynich manuscript don’t appear until the 17th century. At that time, it was owned by an alchemist in Prague, though it may have been owned by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II before that. After shifting hands a few times, the book vanishes from the historical record for more than 200 years. It eventually ended up in the hands of Polish book collector Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 (the manuscript’s modern namesake). It is currently stored at Yale University.

The authorship is unknown. It has been speculated that it could have been written by any one of several 15th-century alchemists or monks. While the idea that the book is a 20th-century fake has been floated, few take it seriously, given the age of the materials and its considerable size.

To sum it all up, the Voynich manuscript is a 15th-century book that is clearly about something strange, written in a language that has proven impossible to decipher, and yet exhibits traits of being a real language. It has been owned by alchemists, maybe even an emperor, and went missing for centuries. If you’re looking for a real-life version of the Necronomicon, this is as close as it gets.

If you’re interested in reading the book, Yale has made it available online for free.