Fantastical encyclopedias have a long and brilliant history, perfectly culminating in architect and designer Luigi Serafini's wondrous illustrations. From the enigmatic Voynich manuscript (a mysterious 15th century codex that has baffled cryptographers) to Jorge Luis Borges' Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (a short story about a mysterious encyclopedia article), they offer a world of curious possibilities.
What Borges' story raises is predominantly a question of epistemology, of how ideas can…
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