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

126 points by california-og ago | 19 comments

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

BugsJustFindMe |next [-]

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

california-og |root |parent [-]

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.

efitz |next |previous [-]

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.

efitz |root |parent [-]

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. :-)

california-og |root |parent [-]

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.

Aardwolf |next |previous [-]

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

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

softgrow |next |previous [-]

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?

california-og |root |parent [-]

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...

djmips |root |parent [-]

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

kevinmiller452 |next |previous [-]

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?

california-og |root |parent [-]

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

arrowassassin |next |previous [-]

Nice

una_usta |next |previous [-]

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

frmfrm |next |previous [-]

Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!

frmfrm |next |previous [-]

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

DonHopkins |next |previous [-]

So EBCDIC art?

mujib77 |next |previous [-]

Unique idea looks good

phyzix5761 |next |previous [-]

Very cool

faddy67 |next |previous [-]

damn amazing

roshiya |next |previous [-]

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