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•Jun 16, 2026
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•Jun 16, 2026
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 :)
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?
I’ve been variously told it looks like the sun, a hedgehog, and a lion & I’m kind fond of all those descriptions
kevinmiller452•Jun 16, 2026
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•Jun 16, 2026
Thank you! If you click on the images, you get a zoomable, full resolution view.
Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!
DonHopkins•Jun 16, 2026
So EBCDIC art?
BugsJustFindMe•Jun 16, 2026
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•Jun 16, 2026
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.
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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.
—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...
I’ve been variously told it looks like the sun, a hedgehog, and a lion & I’m kind fond of all those descriptions
Wow this is awesome, they had box-drawing characters in 1785!
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.