Shhh! Quiet in the Library!!

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Shhh! Quiet in the library!!

Thanks for another cool Book Thread post on a hot July day, O'Muse.

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This week, whilst meandering through YouTube's back alleys of ghosts, UFOs, time-travelers and strange beings, I ran across the video linked below.

Thought I'd save you time and pass along the basic info, although the "bizarre illustrations" items are worth watching it.

Other than the gnostic gospels and the Voynich Manuscript, these were all new to me.

I see several other similar "strange books" videos. I could waste more time not reading, checking them out!

[And I'm inspired - slightly - to do a similar kind of boring ambiant-music-laden "top [number]" video on "inspired" religious works, you know, like Book of Mormon, Course in Miracles, Urantia, Levi's Gospel, and Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science work.]

This video met my standard of no more than one minute per item. That is, no "top ten" list that takes fifteen minutes to plow through.

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7 Most Mysterious Books ever Written
IndexSe7en on YouTube 7:05
https://youtu.be/DMqjZpcOwsk

1.
The Smithfield Decretals
13th Century French manuscript with bizarre illustrations

2.
The Red Book
(apparently not the Red Book of Westmarch that Bilbo wrote)
Carl Jung, 20th Century work using "active imagination" - and apparently was imaginative

3.
Prodigiorum Ac
16th Century work by French humanist Conrad Lycosthenes describes "otherworldly happenings" since the time of Adam and Eve. UFOs, sea monsters, strange critters.

4.
Gnostic Gospels
This seems like an outlier for this list. The 4th Century Nag Hammadi library, Gosp of Mary, Thomas, et al. (What most impressed me about these gospels when I read them, decades ago, was how wisely those who cobbled "the Bible" together were to choose only Matt, Mark, Luke, and Jack.)

5.
Codex Seraphinianus
"Written in a language no one understands and filled with illustrations of surreal and impossible things." Pub in 1981 by Luigi Seraffini, who apparently had some powerful hallucinogens.

6.
Voynich Manuscript
15th Century, maybe Italian. Indescipherable text, bizarre illustrations. Read recently many pages had been ripped out of this work. Hmmm.

7.
The Rohonc Codex
Illustrated manuscript, unknown language, strange illustrations, surfaced in Hungary in the 19th Century.