Ambigrammia: Between Creation and Discovery

On the history and creation of ambigrams, by a pioneer of the practice

In the 1960s and 1970s, a trio of imaginative individuals independently discovered that ordinary words and phrases could be given double readings by playfully distorting the letters composing them. These doubly readable words and phrases, if designed by an artistic eye and hand, could possess great visual beauty. Douglas Hofstadter named such calligraphic creations “ambigrams,” and over the decades he has designed thous...