The pen maketh the exact man so will the typewriter, which is only the modern pen.'Īlong with this hearty defense, they published an image created by one Flora F. 'The endeavor to excel in artistic typewriting unquestionable does this. 'We believe that any endeavor which will cultivate painstaking and accuracy on the part of operators should be encouraged,' they wrote. Stung by the white glove, Illustrated Phonographic World set out to prove that typewriter sketches were indeed worthy of respect. The Reporter's Journal agreed with the Phonetic Journal about 'the foolishness of attempting to make sketches by means of typewriters.' Furthermore, the London publication continued, 'Some of our American contemporaries indulge largely in facsimiles of this class of work, and this has tended to foster the absurd custom.' In September of 1893, a magazine called Illustrated Phonographic World, which was 'Devoted to the Interests of Shorthand and Typewriting,' struck back at two other publications for hating on typewriter art. And Lori Emerson, an English professor at UC-Boulder and director of the Media Archaeology Lab, has been excavating examples of mid-century ' artyping.' It was her tweets and posts that set me off on a journey to put together a rough sketch of the pre-history of ASCII art. This spring, a new anthology will debut, Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology, edited by Barry Tullett. Perhaps the one constant? This kind of text art has been snickered at and marginalized since the 1890s.īut as fewer and fewer typewriters clack away, striking ink to paper, and text continues to cede ground to the hypervisual web, a patina seems to be growing on the art form. What they created is, in some cases, strikingly similar to the ASCII art of the BBS days, but how they thought about what they were doing depended on the times in which they worked. This post traces a fascinating and mostly lost strand of that history: The way thousands and thousands of people made typewriter art, from amateurs to avant gardists. The history of ASCII art goes deeper, and much of it is told only in Geocities blog postings, abandoned websites, Google Books, and scattered PDFs across the web. So, I've always thought of them as native creatures of that time, serving a need for pictures when there wasn't bandwidth to transmit them. And their sketchy aesthetic seemed right for mediums that were provisional and changing rapidly. It was the visual language of BBSs, Telnet, and many other pre-For the brief moment that modems were the preferred mode of access to other computers, they were useful. Though it is still around today, ASCII art reached the zenith of its popularity before the web.

Ascii art cat easy