The Codex · Essay

No. 01 of 3

Mappa Mundi Gallinae

Published

A Mappa Mundi Gallinae, drawn in the conventions of an early-modern portolan chart: rhumb lines, compass rose, dotted trade-routes between the great breeding regions, and crimson markers for the principal lines. The densest concentration sits over Java, Bali, and Sumatra — the heart of the Oriental gamefowl — with secondary clusters in South Asia (Aseel, Asil), East Asia (Shamo, Koeyoshi), the Mediterranean (the Old English Game’s deep ancestry), the United Kingdom, and the American South. The routes mark the spread of the fighting cock from India and the Indies outward, by trade, by gift, and by conquest.

An Illustrated Encyclopedia · Volume I

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From the Editor's desk

A note, found loose in the binding.

To the patient reader who has wandered this far —

The gamecock is a difficult bird. He is beautiful and he is brutal; he is the emblem of three continents and the shame of a dozen legislatures; he is venerated in some yards and hidden in others. The Codex tries to hold all of that at once, and probably doesn't.

This site is small on purpose. There is no comment section, no share button that demands your attention, no algorithmic recapture. There is just a folio of breeds, a chronicle of dates, a shelf of plates, and a long quiet essay about courage. If you have read this far, you are the kind of reader this Codex was written for.

The Konami code, of course, is a small prank — an old coder's joke, embedded in a 19th-century codex. We hope you smiled.

The Editors
The Gamecock Codex, in the year of our Lord MMXXVI

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