This is awesome. When I was a child I typed ASCII art on my mothers two-color typewriter. Now, if I can retire and have a lot of free time, I may go to the typography museum in Leipzig and spend a few days typesetting an ASCII-fied "Tears in the rain" scene from Bladerunner.
The examples in the post are made as an intentional artistic endeavour / test of skill. But there were also practical reasons why a printer would make art out of bent brass rules and typographical elements: engraving, lithography and woodcut production were specialized professions separate from printing.
Imagine you are a "Job Printer" who needs to create 1,000 restaurant menus for a flat fee. You could pay an engraver to create basic art. Or you could cut costs by making your own art with typographical elements already at your shop. The outcome could be good: https://jacobfilipp.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/vol11-p55...
Saved the best for last: love the heavily "pixelated" birds and branches in the last image.
Looking at type specimens on archive.org this year I was actually getting frustrated with the opaqueness of what a brass rule actually is/was
It makes me wonder how much of our documentation nowadays will be incomprehensible in centuries’ time
It's something that makes more sense hands-on. I took a basic letterpress printing workshop[1] at the SF Center for the Book (SFCB[2], a non-profit in SF), so I had an immediate idea of not just what brass rules were and even how they felt in my hands. Making a portrait with them would be a pretty involved, very tactile experience.
There's so much tacit knowledge involved with physical skills and practices that the only way to preserve the knowledge is to keep using and teaching the techniques. For letterpress printing this is going to be the domain of specialized artists and non-profit organizations like SFCB. I really hope that we do manage to keep practices like through the generations; they're unique and beautiful as both a matter of history and a matter of craft.
This is a good reminder to myself that I meant to take the extended "core" letterpress workshop series at the SFCB, but did not have the time or energy for it over the last couple of years. Hopefully I'll do it this fall or something...
[1]: Like this but, IIRC, with a different instructor: https://www.sfcb.org/workshops/calendar/introductiontoletter...
It's neat that folks like John Southward [1] and John Earhart [2] left us with several how-to books for printing from the 1890s!
[1] https://archive.org/details/artisticprinting00sout/page/26/m... [2] https://archive.org/details/colorprintertrea00earh/page/92/m...
Brass rule appears to be... exactly what it sounds like, a straight line made notionally of brass. This isn't exactly an unknown term; compare the <hr> tag.
> I was struck with a strange dream of trying to replicate his image using impractical typographic methods.
Computer Science academic born way ahead of their time.
This is OG ASCII art.
Agreed. A great example of pushing contemporary tech to do new things and unintentionally forecast even newer things and contexts
The name Malmiola is like a portmanteau of the surnames of Yngwie Malmsteen and Al Di Meola.
