In 2015, a hobbyist turned scholar launched Garden of Flowers, an online archive that grew out of a BA thesis on Amiga ASCII art. Curious about pre‑ASCII text art, the creator mapped early visual typography, noting that typewriter art and shaped poetry are often overlooked, and began cataloguing metal‑type images from the early printing presses of Europe.

Over eight years the author amassed roughly 2500 images spanning the 1600s to the 2020s, sourced from public digital collections like the Internet Archive and national libraries. A friend, Adel Faure, coded the site, making the dataset browseable worldwide and searchable by country, year, or subject and enabling researchers to explore typographic evolution across continents today.

Images are displayed without permission for educational use, with sources cited wherever possible. The author welcomes corrections and new leads, noting that relevant works scatter across languages and niche taxonomies—terms like typotecture, stigmatypie, and Bildsatz hide in archives. Contributors can submit findings via the site’s feedback channel and invite archivists worldwide to enrich the collection.

By mapping over four centuries of metal‑type imagery, Garden of Flowers offers designers, historians, and typographers a searchable lens into the visual language that preceded digital fonts. The project underscores how early printing techniques influence modern type design and provides a ready‑made corpus for scholarly analysis and serves as a foundational resource for future typographic research today.