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Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art (garden-of-flowers.heikkilotvonen.com)

162 points by california-og ↗ HN
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

21 comments

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efitz
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.
softgrow
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?
frmfrm
Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!
frmfrm
Would love to suggest having a way to get the whole archive and metadata to browse locally or mirror, perhaps via a torrent?
kevinmiller452
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?
BugsJustFindMe
Hey, this archive you've put together is extremely impressive. How did you find all of these? Literally keyword search on digital collections?
quakeguy
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.

california-og
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.
contingencies
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.
california-og
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.

zvr
That's wonderful!

I can also recommend a book from my library: Typoésie by Jérôme Peignot (Imprimerie nationale editions, Paris, 1993), ISBN 2-11-081272-9 (or newer edition 9782742757985).

From the book description: The works of the great typographers of the 20th century are featured: Maximilien Vox, Cassandre’s “Bifur,” Piet Zwart, the Americans Martin Solomon and Herb Lubalin, Raymond Gid, and Guy Levis Mano. The book also showcases the visual poetry of the Germans Gomringer, Mon, and Rühm; the Brazilians de Campos and Pignatari; Emmet Williams; Christian Dotremont; and Jacques Roubaud; and the “typoems” by painters such as Matisse, Magritte, Duchamp, Lissitzky, Raymond Hains, Jiri Kollar, Jasper Johns, and Valerio Adami. Even mathematics and musical notation are included.