In the fourth dialogue of Gödel, Escher, Bach, titled “Contracrostipunctus”, the Tortoise describes how Bach encoded his name B-A-C-H as musical notes in Art of the Fugue but died before finishing the work, leaving the acrostic phrase on the final page of the fugue. Inspired by this, Hofstadter encodes a self-referential double acrostic in the dialogue. The first letters of each turn spell out “Hofstadter’s Contracrostipunctus Acrostically Backwards Spells ‘J. S. Bach’”, and indeed the first letters of each word in the acrostic spell out H-C-A-B-S-J, or “J. S. Bach” spelled backwards.
