Show HN: Garden of Flowers – an archive of pictorial typography before ASCII art
70 points - today at 4:25 AM
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
kevinmiller452
today at 9:16 AM
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
today at 9:23 AM
Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.
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.
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
today at 6:08 AM
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.
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?
Absolutely incredible, thank you for making this!
Would love to suggest having a way to get the whole archive and metadata to browse locally or mirror, perhaps via a torrent?
phyzix5761
today at 5:51 AM
Very cool