Every April, I present some of the best puzzles I’ve stumbled upon during the previous year for a “Puzzler Edition” of my Field Notes column in the North Coast Journal. Here’s a link to this year’s. The problem is that I always have more puzzles than available column-inches. LoCO to the rescue! Here are some that didn’t make it. I hope you’ll give them a try before scrolling down to the answers.

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1. Scott Kim says he created this sweet little brainteaser when he was 12. A capital letter of the alphabet has been cut out of a piece of paper, and a single fold then made. What letter is it? Note: it’s not “L”!

Scott Kim, if you’re not familiar with the name, is a computer game designer and puzzle maker. He’s been writing the “Boggler” column for Discover magazine for decades. I first met him nearly 30 years ago in a Palo Alto copy shop halfway between where he was then working, the computer science department of Stanford University, and our home in the Bay Area. His book Inversions contains dozens of names and phrases that remain the same when reflected or inverted. Here’s his 1990 business card, unfolded, where “Inversions” — inverted — becomes “Scott Kim.” Also notice two words from the title of his Mac product (“Letterforms” and “Illusions”) secreted into one.

I asked him if he could do anything with my name. “Spell it for me,” he said. I did. “Great! Five letters each. Easy.” I watched bemused as, without pausing, he wrote the following on the back of his card. He must have taken all of 30 seconds between hearing my name and reproducing it. (I tried and tried to repeat his half-minute effort, without success.)

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Oh, sorry, I promised a few puzzles.

2. Cross out six letters to make a common word: B S A I N X L E A T N T E A R S

3. How about finding a common word with three pairs of double letters? “Keeper” (a word you can find in any book) has one pair, for instance.

4. “7 D I A W” stands for “seven days in a week; “4ever Y” means Forever Young. What do the following stand for?

• 3 C I A F
• A 4 1, 1 4 A
• 10der I T N
• G 4th A M
• A T O 2 C
• 7 D S
• 8een 12 O
• T 7th S
• The 19th H

5. Anagrams sometimes attempt to define the original word, e.g. “William Shakespeare” becomes both “We all make his praise” and “I ask me: Has Will a peer?” Can you find appropriate anagrams for: the Mona Lisa, punishment, the nudist colony.

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Answers

1. The letter F (upside down) hides beneath the fold.

2. Cross out SIXLETTERS to get BANANAS.

3. Bookkeeper. (Yeah, corny clue, I know.)

4. Three Coins in a Fountain; All for one, one for all; Tender Is the Night; Go forth and multiply; A Tale of Two Cities; Seven Deadly Sins; 1812 Overture; The Seventh Seal; The nineteenth hole

5. No hat, a smile. Nine thumps. No untidy clothes.