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Comment by sgustard | Hacker News Reader

The title of his column and book "Metamagical Themas" is an anagram of Martin Gardner's previous column "Mathematical Games". It's clever wordplay turtles all the way down.

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Other Hofstadter book titles with wordplay:

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (you have GEB/EGB, and I guarantee you he noticed those notes form a musical triad)

- Metamagical Themas (anagram of Mathematical Games)

- Le Ton beau de Marot (I don't have my copy at hand, but "ton beau" is surely a pun on "tombeau" meaning "tomb")

- The Mind's I (editor) (I = eye)

- That Mad Ache (translation of "La chamade" by Francoise Sagan; "mad ache" is an anagram of "chamade")

At least one of the covers of GEB specifically had artwork that shows GEB/EGB : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

"tombeau" literally means "tomb", but the term also sometimes means "piece written as a memorial", like Ravel's piano suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin". And yes, Hofstadter explicitly links "ton beau" with "tombeau" (he doesn't explicitly mention the "memorial" meaning, though when he mentions the literal "tombeau de Marot" he is talking specifically about the epitaph on it) and also with "tome beau", the great book of Marot's life and work.

I'd find it a cleverer bit of wordplay if "le ton beau de ..." itself didn't feel clumsy. Surely it would always be "le beau ton de ..."?

This was all somewhere in the back of my head but my copy of this book is in my parents' basement somewhere. I'll have to rescue it so I can keep it in my basement.

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