Puzzle-loving Dopers, help me solve a mystery that’s had me stumped for years.
I solved all of the puzzles in the Paul Adshead book “Puzzle Island”, except for one: in each picture, parts of it would jut out into the surrounding frame so that some or all of certain objects would overlap onto one or more letters. This seems to spell out some sort of message (for example, page one seems to unambiguously spell out the word “join”), but in the later pages the letters thus “marked” don’t seem to make any sort of word and the overlap is so ambiguous that I can’t tell which letters are supposed to be considered “marked”.
If there are any takers, I’ll start scanning the book I have on hand, cropping out everything except for the frame. Maybe the collective brainpower of the Dope can help me figure out if this is some sort of Easter Egg or if I’ve been whooshed by a whimsical artist.
But that is not what the page of instructions (from your scan) says to do. It says to find four hidden animals, whose names are also spelled out, in anagram form, by the letters missing from the surrounding alphabets. From these anagrams, these animals are clearly CAT, HEN, DOG, and COW. I can’t actually see any of these in the scan (even the one said to be "barking up the left side of the treehouse), but perhaps that is because the scan is too blurry.
Even using your ‘overlap’ criterion, I have no idea how you are getting JOIN from that picture. Overlapped letters seem to to be W I T H. Given the instructions, however, presumably that fact that that is a word is a coincidence.
Is this a whoosh! I would suspect spam, except that the OP join date is 2004.
If the first page had started out like this, I would have dismissed it to be an amusing side-note. But we’ve had four pages of cases where the “overlap” has apparently spelled coherent words (in a book, I remind you, about puzzles).
But now I can’t make a word out of this. The letters are, in alphabetical order “A, A, H, J, N, O, R, T”–not counting blanks, it’s “A, H, J, N, R, T”.
Is this a proper noun of some sort? Or is this the point where the artist is telling us “gotcha, the letters don’t mean anything”?
I’m guessing the B doesn’t count. So EAST, and we just had SOUTH, and I note that the “A, A, H, J, N, O, R, T” one contains NORTH. (But then why the added AJA? Are we supposed to play Where’s Steely Dan?)
But that is not what the page of instructions (from your scan) says to do. It says to find four hidden animals, whose names are also spelled out, in anagram form, by the letters missing from the surrounding alphabets. From these anagrams, these animals are clearly CAT, HEN, DOG, and COW. I can’t actually see any of these in the scan (even the one said to be "barking up the left side of the treehouse), but perhaps that is because the scan is too blurry.