Solving a Century-Old Typographical Mystery
The Atlantic - By Jacob Harris - May 23, 2016
How a strange face in a random 19th-century newspaper ad became a portal to a forgotten moment in ASCII art history...This is the story of how I ended up captivated by a chance encounter with a 135-year-old newspaper advertisement—and how the random face staring back at me from the archives would reveal the surprising origins of ASCII art, a graphic design technique that’s usually associated with 20th-century computer art.
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Which is how one day I stumbled across the Treasurer, and found myself confronted with a mystery. It was the full-faced portrait of a man with a sleepy smile, wide nose, prominent lapels and a jaunty bow tie. White-space details emerged from a background made entirely of the repeated letter B. Above his head is only the simple caption “The Treasurer” and below is a generic listing for the Brooklyn Furniture Company. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
The face resembles modern ASCII art, but it was published at a time— March 20, 1881—that seemed impossibly early. I checked to see if there were other ads like it—a tedious process that required me to virtually flip through old issues one page at a time—and surmised it only ran once in the spring of 1881. Because ASCII art involves using small textual elements—letters, apostrophes, dashes, and so forth—to create a larger design, it's impossible to search for such ads using keywords like “Coca-Cola.”
To the computer, the ad just looks like a meaningless sequence of repeated characters. No other ads by Brooklyn Furniture Company appeared in the Times in the weeks before or after the ad I had found. Nor could I find similar text-based art from any other advertisers around that time. I assumed it was just a strange unicorn from the archives, a weird invention from a bored printer who just accidentally had invented ASCII art. For a while, I forgot about it.
Until I found another.
On February 27, 1881, the Brooklyn Furniture Company ran an ad proclaiming “the President of the Brooklyn Furniture Company has decided to make sweeping reductions in prices,” and it featured the side profile of a genial and balding man rendered simply in text using the letters B, F, and C. Now there were two mysterious faces. I decided it was time to find out more about what exactly the Brooklyn Furniture Company was.
Located in three storefronts on Fulton Street, the firm was founded in the 1870s as the Bridgeport Furniture Company, but soon changed its name to reflect the rising fortunes of its borough. In ads, it promised “liberal credit” and layaway for those who couldn’t pay full price. And it was a prolific advertiser, apparently locked in a fierce struggle for customers against similar furniture retailers in New York.
In an 1899 profile, the president of the company told the advertising publication Printer’s Ink that he had spent up to $80,000—the equivalent of $2.5 million today—entirely on newspaper advertising in the previous years. Another Printer’s Ink article, in 1901, reported that the company spent more annually on advertising than all 23 of London’s top furniture stores combined, and noted that a competitor thought nothing of spending more than $2,000—roughly $57,000 in today’s dollars—on just one single day of advertisements in all the Sunday newspapers.
For context, a full-page ad in the Sunday Times can run you more than $100,000 today, according to a 2014 story in the Times. But the media landscape in the 1890s was not like today. There were 58 daily newspapers in New York City alone, and although we think of it as a giant today, the Times itself was firmly in the middle of the pack. I had seemingly wandered into the early skirmishes of a wide-ranging advertising war. Was it possible there were even more ads like The Treasurer out there? I needed to look at other newspapers.
And so I joined newspapers.com, a commercial archive of newspapers that has digitized text from stories and advertisements. I quickly found several other instances of the President ad, with its first run in The Sun on the early day of October 13, 1878. And I soon found many other instances of text art too. The front page of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle from June 14, 1877 includes several companies that spelled out their names in large capital letters formed by regular-sized letters—a format I call “ASCII Caps”—while the Brooklyn Furniture Company waggishly chose to run “MY WIFE” at the top of its ad, presumably as a way to capture readers’ attention.
It seemed that many of the newspapers of the era carried such illustrations, with large titles and sometimes simple shapes like hearts and crosses all composed out of type. I know it as ASCII art, but it appeared roughly a hundred years before the personal computer even existed. Of course, before there were computers, there were typewriters, and the first recorded instances of typewriter art date back to at least 1893, but I’d never seen a record of any other ASCII-type art as early as the 1870s. I felt like an archaeologist who picks up an ancient clay urn and finds a modern emoji on it.
The Brooklyn Furniture Company's designs would look right at home on a Geocities page or designed within Broderbund’s The Print Shop software, because they all stem from the same need: to be more expressive than technology otherwise allows. In the early days of computers, those first graphics were text inside terminals or printed by daisywheel printers. However, unlike other ASCII art, the designs in these newspapers were definitely not created on typewriters—but painstakingly composed one letter at a time with blocks of type by professional typesetters. Nor are they actually art per se, but stylistic tactics employed to exploit scarcity as an advantage.
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More than a century later, I’m still left with many questions. For starters, why was the Brooklyn Furniture Company seemingly the only advertiser to make portraits this way? Did the first ASCII advertisers have any sense of what they had done—or were they, in fact, drawing inspiration from some other source, perhaps hiding somewhere in the dusty annals of publishing history? Online archives made this whole search possible, but I would love to know so much more about this era from the perspective of the printers and the advertisers and the readers.
But all those involved are long dead—even the Brooklyn Furniture Company itself was absorbed by a competitor in 1929. So I can only guess at motivations from what small scraps of the past I have observed. The observations themselves have been somewhat arbitrary, based on wanderings through the archives and lucky happenstance. Ultimately, I am more of a tourist than a time-traveler. After all, no digital collection can fully reveal what the past was really like. There will always be mysteries left unexplained.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/the-ascii-mystery-face/483698/
