Below is an ambigram I created in 2012, a variation on one I drew during a spate of ambigramming six years earlier. It reads the same when rotated 180 degrees, appropriate since most all crossword grids do the same thing. This and two other ambigrams I designed appeared in Nikita Prokhorov's book
Ambigrams Revealed in 2013.
I'm not sure I would have ever thought to create such a thing had it not been for the work of
Scott Kim and
John Langdon, who separately put ambigrams on the map in the 1970s. Scott Kim called his creations inversions, which was the name of his 1981 book
Inversions. John Langdon's book
Wordplay was published in 1992.
Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer winner for
Gödel, Escher, Bach, coined the term ambigram in the '80s.
The first known ambigram was created in 1893 by Peter Newell in his book of drawings called
Topsys & Turvys. The final page of the book features a drawing and a poem.
The start of the poem appears below the left image:
And now appears a mystic word, but if it be inverted,
And when the page is rotated (right image), the poem concludes:
We find the ending of this book in plainest text asserted.
Newell's entire book can be viewed
HERE.
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