upside down and backwards
1/9/2021
Looking at things upside down or sideways can be fascinating. It’s even more fun when the object you are looking at doesn’t appear to be upside down or sideways because it makes sense the way it is. The same picture seen upside up and upside down may look like completely different pictures or words. Like pig and bid, depending on how you draw the g, so it looks like a B upside down.
| A word or picture that makes sense upside down is called an ambigram. The word ambigram was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, an American scholar of cognitive science, best known as the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach. The earliest ambigrams are artistically drawn words based on palindromes. A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same forwards and backwards. A palindrome can be as simple as a name like Ana or Otto that is spelled the same forward and backwards. Or it can be a phrase, like A man, a plan, a canal: Panama. Or: A Santa at Nasa. The novel Dr Awkward & Olson in Oslo by Lawrence Levine is probably the longest palindrome ever written. It is about 200 pages long. People have been drawing words and pictures that take advantage of this tendency to make sense of things for hundreds of years. The oldest art I could find that works upside down is by Peter Newell, in his book Topsys & Turvys. He published art he would later use in this book in 1893. The book was first published in 1902, and has been in print ever since. | Topsys&Turvys by Peter Newell BUY TOPSYS & TURVYS |
Peter Newell is an artist, a storyteller, and a magician. He can tell a story from start to finish with one drawing – all you have to do is turn it upside down. His pictures fool the reader’s eye. They look completely different when you invert them. A palm tree becomes a leg. A monster becomes a duck. A ship becomes a bird.
The stories are short and funny. The art is an astonishment every time I look at it.
The current version is hard cover. Here is the cover of the original paperback version upside up.
Here is an ambigram story from the middle of the book:
And here is the final text ambigram, which is one word or two words, depending how you look at it.
All the pages are short stories with beginnings and endings being the same picture upside down.
Here are some more ambigrams:
Here are the websites I used to research this article, and a few to play with and make your own ambigrams:
https://www.pinterest.com/rett/two-way-drawings/
https://www.pinterest.com/shanethowell/ambigram/
https://www.wowtattoos.com/collections/asymmetrical-ambigrams?page=4
ambigram generator: https://fontmeme.com/ambigram-font/
https://flipscript.com/en/flip
https://newikis.com/en/Ambigram
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Ambigram
https://www.qedcat.com/articles/ambigram.pdf
http://www.palindromelist.net/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram
http://mediafervor.com/ambigram-logo-design/
