This is wonderful, thanks for sharing. I'm a big fan of Hofstadter, but knew about ambigrams before I knew about him, so I'm delighted (but not all that surprised) to find out he coined the term!
I too love the art of creating an ambigram and my favourite one I've created is one that reads PUSH from one side of a glass door and PULL from the other. Here it is:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DH6W36voMe-/
Another textual constraint challenge I found similarly satisfying with Hofstadter's "repeated savoring of unanticipated small pieces of visual magic", was one I set myself as a teen to create the word CTRL (my graffiti tag) out of two components for each letter, but the same two components for every letter. I managed to dig out an image of it: https://gist.github.com/OisinMoran/0ca8dbdfea83d2250e723a034...
GEB was what really turned me on to math. I mean, I was good at math by the standards of a mid-tier high school, but was satisfied to work through the problems and proofs, or use math in my physics class and electronics hobby. But my older brother read GEB then gave it to me. I had also been reading Hofstadter's "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American.
But GEB exposed me to a level of math that seemed to beyond puzzles and applications. Or maybe it was just his engaging style. Or my cool big brother. Regardless, I started college as a math major.
Other things happened since then, and I now have a physics degree, but still enjoy math as an end unto itself.
GEB still holds pride of place on my bookshelf, I would be interested to hear what are the others you recommend. Have you read The Planiverse by AK Dewdeney?
It's exciting to see that a new Hofstadter book is out!
With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.
Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:
font : benzene right
creator : doug
create date : Tue Feb 19 15:39:48 EST 1991
last edit : feb 24 94
a 058002400B0000
b 04824B00090000
c 04800100090000
so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided. So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something, there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.
That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.
Another Doug Hofstadter book! This is so cool. Ambigrams have been one of my fav "things" since I saw them in the GEB book ages ago.
FWIW, "Angels and Demons" bestseller thriller (?) has a few ambigram puzzles that the protagonist Robert Langdon solves to get to the mystery of the Rosslyn chapel (my memory may be fading here)
--x--
Thanks for this set of amazing fonts! They look amazing. Very glyph-y. And they tickle my inner geek.
I used to make these quite often: https://cards.azriel.im/
Now I still make them occasionally, though I haven't updated the blog for a while.
I find that tangible art could sometimes say "thank you" more than the utterance of the words themselves.
Also makes for a great wedding gift:
https://cards.azriel.im/2018/09/kevin-fiona.html
Recent and related:
Ambigr.am - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45478780 - Oct 2025 (40 comments)
Also, gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/10/ambigrams-...
This is wonderful, thanks for sharing. I'm a big fan of Hofstadter, but knew about ambigrams before I knew about him, so I'm delighted (but not all that surprised) to find out he coined the term!
I too love the art of creating an ambigram and my favourite one I've created is one that reads PUSH from one side of a glass door and PULL from the other. Here it is: https://www.instagram.com/p/DH6W36voMe-/
Another textual constraint challenge I found similarly satisfying with Hofstadter's "repeated savoring of unanticipated small pieces of visual magic", was one I set myself as a teen to create the word CTRL (my graffiti tag) out of two components for each letter, but the same two components for every letter. I managed to dig out an image of it: https://gist.github.com/OisinMoran/0ca8dbdfea83d2250e723a034...
note the author is Douglas Hofstadter who wrote Godel Escher Bach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
GEB was what really turned me on to math. I mean, I was good at math by the standards of a mid-tier high school, but was satisfied to work through the problems and proofs, or use math in my physics class and electronics hobby. But my older brother read GEB then gave it to me. I had also been reading Hofstadter's "Mathematical Games" in Scientific American.
But GEB exposed me to a level of math that seemed to beyond puzzles and applications. Or maybe it was just his engaging style. Or my cool big brother. Regardless, I started college as a math major.
Other things happened since then, and I now have a physics degree, but still enjoy math as an end unto itself.
Such a great book! I feel like skimming through it again now, to remind myself exactly how Godel's argument worked.
Exactly. Along with a few other books.
GEB still holds pride of place on my bookshelf, I would be interested to hear what are the others you recommend. Have you read The Planiverse by AK Dewdeney?
It's exciting to see that a new Hofstadter book is out!
With respect to bringing beauty into the world in dark times, it's always worth remembering Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 in C Major, Op. 60, "Leningrad", composed in Leningrad during its 900-day siege by the Nazis, and first performed there later that year, with some of the musicians fainting from starvation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOkBEqtGUI8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symphony_No._7_(Shostakovich)
— ⁂ —
In case there are other Hofstadter letterform fans here, last year I tracked down the "gridfonts" repository his research group had put together as part of their work on "letter spirit" last millennium, at https://wayback.archive-it.org/219/20060606215909/http://www.... There were 287 gridfonts in it. I reverse-engineered the file format (before finding the Scheme code that decoded it), hacked together a Python 3 script http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/gridfontparse.py to convert it to PostScript, and produced this PDF with all the gridfonts: http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/all-gridfonts.pdf
I think I may have been the first person to see some of these fonts in 20 years. But, apparently, there were hundreds more. I have a vague memory that maybe they were lost in a disk crash.
Letterforms aren't copyrightable under US law, where the file in question was initially published, but outline font files are because they are "computer programs". Gridfont letters are 56-bit bitmaps indicating which segments are turned on or off, which to me are obviously not computer programs. Nobody that I know of has ever litigated over letterforms like these:
so I don't think their copyright status has ever been decided. So, if you decide to use these in your product logo or something, there's no guarantee you won't lose a lawsuit to Hofstadter (or his estate, or Indiana University). Don't say I didn't warn you.That said, that wasn't the motivation for creating them, so I think the risk is fairly small.
Another Doug Hofstadter book! This is so cool. Ambigrams have been one of my fav "things" since I saw them in the GEB book ages ago.
FWIW, "Angels and Demons" bestseller thriller (?) has a few ambigram puzzles that the protagonist Robert Langdon solves to get to the mystery of the Rosslyn chapel (my memory may be fading here)
--x--
Thanks for this set of amazing fonts! They look amazing. Very glyph-y. And they tickle my inner geek.