Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art

Posted by california-og 1 day ago

Hey all, I made this. The archive started with my 2015 BA thesis on Amiga ASCII art when I was curious about the history of ASCII art but found very little on text art that came before it. The historical precursors are often attributed to typewriter art and shaped/visual poetry, but I think letterpress is overlooked. So, I got slightly obsessed and started a personal database of pictures built entirely from metal type, ornaments, and rule, some going back to the 1600s. After eight years, I've managed to find ~2500 images. My friend Adel Faure built the website so it's now browseable by anyone!

I would like to note that most images are from public digital collections (Internet Archive, national libraries, etc.) and displayed without permission (for educational purposes). I've tried to source every image, but check the original source and its license before reusing anything. I'd be happy to take down or correct anything.

It's also incomplete and surely has errors and misattributions. Corrections to anything are very welcome.

If anyone has leads on works I haven't catalogued, I'd love to hear them! The practice and pictures are scattered across languages and keywords (type picture, typosignet, typotectur, Bildsatz, stigmatypie, stunt typography...), so things hide in odd corners of archives. If you've seen something like this, please point me at it.

There's also a longer essay on how it began: https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?essay

Comments

Comment by quakeguy 16 hours ago

Very nice, i have a book in my library which you’ll find interesting.

Jeremy Adler and Ulrich Ernst

Text als Figur

https://www.amazon.de/Text-als-Figur-Visuelle-Moderne/dp/352...

It is full of pictures like you have collected.

Example:

https://imgur.com/a/mWL4kSs

Sadly it seems this book is rather rare.

Comment by california-og 15 hours ago

Thank you for this! I had come across it by name before but totally forgot about it until you mentioned it again. I'll have to hunt it down, seems like some antique bookshops have it for a reasonable price.

Comment by quakeguy 8 hours ago

I have found a pdf, it was on the InternetArchive, but got taken down there. AA has it!

Comment by efitz 1 day ago

You should look at some Arabic calligraphy- there is a lot of artistic Arabic calligraphy where passages from the Quran, poetry, and other text are written beautifully as art.

Comment by efitz 1 day ago

BTW sorry for my rudeness, I find your project very cool and I love calligraphic type projects. I was so excited that I wanted to share something related to you. :-)

Comment by california-og 1 day ago

Heh no worries and thanks! I love Arabic/Islamic calligraphy too, but I've had to leave out all calligraphic forms of text art (calligrammes, micrography, carmina figurata, 17th century european calligraphic art, etc..) out of the archive to keep the scope of the project focused and clear. Otherwise it would take me another 8 years :)

However, there's some arabic letterpress stuff in the archive! https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=arabic I hope to find more, especially the kufic style, but I haven't found many good sources for that kind of stuff yet.

Comment by una_usta 1 day ago

This is awesome! A few months ago I got a tattoo of one of the flowers from https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

I’ve been variously told it looks like the sun, a hedgehog, and a lion & I’m kind fond of all those descriptions

Comment by Aardwolf 1 day ago

> https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?page=LKBGE51F3...

Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!

Comment by BugsJustFindMe 20 hours ago

Hey, this archive you've put together is extremely impressive. How did you find all of these? Literally keyword search on digital collections?

Comment by california-og 18 hours ago

Thank you! It has taken me a long time. The two main methods:

1. Text content search with keywords/sentences or people's names. This is the best way, but finding good keywords is hard. 2. Randomly browsing, especially typography trade journals. Internet Archive has all issues of Inland Printer for example. Reading through them I've found many new pictures and keywords to do further searches on.

Comment by softgrow 1 day ago

At school studying typing there was a class of 66 all manual typewriters except for the two electrics. If you were good and had some spare time, you were given printed instructions to type particular characters and returns. Sometimes shift into red ink. Do it properly and you got an image. So maybe pre ASCII art?

Comment by california-og 1 day ago

Definitely! Take a look at these books:

—Fun with your typewriter by Madge Roemer https://archive.org/details/FunWithTypewriter/mode/thumb

—Artyping by Julius Nelson https://archive.org/details/Artyping-HQ/mode/thumb

—Typewriter Art by Alan Riddell https://archive.org/details/TypewriterArt-AlanRiddell/mode/t...

Comment by djmips 18 hours ago

I remember being a kid in early 80s typing class and trying to make pictures. Your archive is fantastic.

Comment by contingencies 15 hours ago

That first one is clearly ASCII art predecessor. Thanks, typing pool, for BBS art!

Comment by kevinmiller452 1 day ago

Love this. The 18th century type specimens are gorgeous and it's amazing you pulled them from old digitized books. Do you have plans to add any interactive features like zoom on the images?

Comment by california-og 1 day ago

Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.

Comment by frmfrm 1 day ago

Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!

Comment by frmfrm 1 day ago

Would love to suggest having a way to get the whole archive and metadata to browse locally or mirror, perhaps via a torrent?

Comment by contingencies 16 hours ago

I noticed Asia is severely underrepresented. This is normal in western collections, but there are exceptions. You should find great examples from China, India, Indonesia, Iran (actually Muslim countries in general), Japan, and Vietnam. Some potential leads on works you haven't catalogued: (1) The collection search site for the Dutch 'Wereldmuseum' in Rotterdam, which houses the state collection (they were the first to Japan). (2) The same for Lisbon's Museu do Oriente. (3) International Dunhuang Project, affiliated with the British Library, which has scanned some of the earliest printed works in Asia with a good digital catalogue, some of which have graphic elements. (4) Musee Guimet, Paris. (5) The Print and Graphic Communication Museum in Lyon. (6) The National Technical Museum in Prague (great printing and photography holdings). (7) Asian art auction records. (8) Should you broaden to sculpture, many of the great Buddhist and Hindu carved stone monuments incorporate text with their form elements, though generally not integrally. (9) Chinese folk arts of paper-cut, embroidery (upholstery/cloth/fashion) and new year folk printed door poster art probably have some exceptional examples, as will some cast bronze sculptures such as temple incense burners.

Comment by california-og 15 hours ago

Yes, I agree. Thank you for the advice and leads, much appreciated! I will dig into these. The archive is scoped to letterpress only, so that will automatically skew it more towards latin based typographic cultures, but I would like to find more non Latin stuff, especially Arabic. Haven't yet found very good archives for that though.

Some Japanese letterpress works I already have catalogued, and they're amazing:

https://garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com/?filters=japan

A recent blogpost by Jacob Filipp has good info on it:

https://jacobfilipp.com/hana-no-shiori/

Unfortunately the Japanese archives that I've found have mostly poor quality microfilms though, which makes further search a bit unmotivating.

Comment by contingencies 13 hours ago

Check London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) library too. https://www.soas.ac.uk/soas-library/special-collections