This evening Scott Kim gave a webinar for Fundapromat, the Panamanian Foundation for the Promotion of Mathematics, on the topic of “Ambigrams.” In that webinar, Scott mentioned in passing P. S. Newell’s 1893 book Topsys & Turvys as a forerunner of the genre.

The only textual ambigram in Newell’s book appears on the last page, where the word “PUZZLE” inverts to form the words “THE END.”

The book is downloadable from the Library of Congress (here), but since it’s hard to appreciate the upside-down parts in a PDF viewer… and since I already had the code to rotate images in the browser… here’s Topsys & Turvys (1893), the HTML5 version! Hover or tap to rotate each image below.

See also:

• “Scott Kim’s rotational ambigrams for the Celebration of Mind” (2020-10-18)

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