Heikki's Garden of Flowers aims to be a comprehensive catalogue of historical and contemporary pictorial letterpress works. The archive is collected and maintained by Heikki Lotvonen. However, the work is ongoing and incomplete. If you know of any works, or know of any leads, that are not catalogued here, or otherwise want to chat about type pictures, you can reach me best by email hlotvonen@gmail.com or on Mastodon https://typo.social/@gdc. I will update the collection once in a while, after I've gathered a bunch of new materials, probably around once-a-year.
The archive has more than 2500 images as of 2026. But, for a more focused set of 50, you can find my favourites in the Heikki's favourites collection.
Most images are collected from various online archives like the Internet Archive and national library digital collections. They are collected and displayed without permission, so refer to the original source and check their licences before re-using the images anywhere. This site is intended purely for educational purposes. I've tried to add sources to as many images as possible, but if some are missing and you would like to know them, contact me again at hlotvonen@gmail.com.
The site wouldn't exist without my friend and fellow ASCII artist Adel Faure who developed the site. Thank you! Thank you also to Centre for Text Margins, Grafia and Kone Foundation for supporting my work and research. Thank you also to all the people, museums, libraries and institutions that tirelessly digitize and make available high quality scans of old books, magazines and ephemera.
The name "Heikki's Garden of Flowers" comes from type ornaments. Type ornaments are sometimes called printer's flowers or fleurons (derived from the French word fleur, meaning flower, and referring to small floral decorations). While ordinary typefaces have alphabetic characters engraved on them, type ornaments feature images or patterns instead. But, it's important to also mention that I consider art made with type ornaments text art: type ornaments are identical in manufacture and use with regular characters. Both are cast with ordinary metal type in different font sizes, and set as type by the compositor. They are typographic in nature, letter-like in feeling, in balance and in typographic "color".
For those unfamiliar with letterpress printing, here's a recent (2019) print and its corresponding forme by Naomi Kent of Inksquasher to illustrate the technique. Note that even the empty space is packed with spacing material, so that nothing shifts under pressure when printing (pressure is what creates a good impression when the press squeezes the paper against the inked type). The work to arrange it all into a tightly packed forme is extremely laborious and requires a lot of focus, patience and wit.