Named for the ornamental hedera symbol or printers’ flower, this growing gallery of historical, pictorial letterpress work, ranging from the fifteenth to the mid-twentieth century, curated by category, the Garden of Flowers from Heikki Lotvonen—via discover via fellow internet peripatetic Messy Nessy—is a fantastic homage to the typographic and ingenuity in the outlines, shading and hashing of the printed glyph as a precursor to ASCII art (Lotvonen’s own bachelor’s thesis was on the subject of the Amiga moveable type—see also), 
like this eighteenth century demonstration of transfer printing for decorating ceramics, requiring an arduous and precise level of typesetting to prepare the printing plate first which according to the sources never quite turned out to everyone’s satisfaction, or this rather arresting view of the city of Valencia rendered in letterforms from the 1870s, painstakingly formatted by Castilian compositor Andrรฉs Ferrer. There are thousands of examples of broadsheets, mastheads and spot illustrations to peruse that show the ingenuity and inventiveness of print-setting to use existing slugs in the workshop, letters rotated but still sticking to the script. Much more at the links above.
