Over a third of the book is devoted to the study and collection of
anagrams. Of the 1169 anagrams Bergerson lists, most are sourced to the files of the
National Puzzlers' League, and some had been previously printed in
Dmitri Borgmann's
Language on Vacation. Other sections of the book cover
palindromes of various forms, including palindromic poetry by
J. A. Lindon, Graham Reynolds, and Bergerson himself. Among these is Bergerson's "Edna Waterfall", a 1039-letter poem which was for some time listed by the
Guinness Book of World Records as the longest palindrome in English. Most of Bergerson's other original palindromes are credited not to himself but rather to Edwin Fitzpatrick, a fictitious 19th-century poet. (Bergerson had invented Fitzpatrick some years earlier, though did not openly admit to the hoax until shortly before his book was released. To Bergerson's surprise, his joke had fooled even his publisher.) Besides the titular forms of wordplay, the book devotes chapters to
vocabularyclept poetry (a special form of
anagrammatic poetry in which the words of a poem are rearranged into a new poem) and written
charades. == Reception and legacy ==