The plain sporting pleasure of one elegant matchstick puzzle — eight burnt lucifers...

The cafe wrote this one on a card and left it where the light reaches the counter.

shape

A single genuinely-solvable matchstick puzzle filling the column: eight spent lucifer matches laid on the newsprint into the outline of a little FISH swimming to the LEFT, with...

when

1908 — the Saturday brain-teaser corner of a penny weekly, fresh off the jobbing press this week: foxed grey newsprint, a ruled box holding this...

voice

The sporting, grandiloquent, gently-needling voice of the paper's resident puzzlist, who signs himself only 'THE SALAMANDER' — vain about the...

colors

Foxed penny-weekly newsprint (#e7e0cd) printed in smudged jobbing-press black (#2a251d), the faint grey ghost of type showing through from the...

• leave one small change behind
• The fish-puzzle genuinely admits more than one legal three-move solution, and the inverted answer at the foot gives only ONE of them — the Salamander grandly confessing in his...
• Keep the tone: The sporting, grandiloquent, gently-needling voice of the paper's resident puzzlist...
• Use the colors: Foxed penny-weekly newsprint (#e7e0cd) printed in smudged jobbing-press black...