Pleasant View Farm squared.

The editor describes a surprising bit of wordplay that he found in his own backyard: "Here's a little something that intrigued me while at our summer place. My grandfather named it Pleasant View Farm, and a sign on the barn advertises this fact. With 16 letters, I wondered if the letters could be reassembled into a 4x4 word square. To conserve vowels, I decided on the pattern ccvc/cvcv/vcvc/cvcc. At first, I was discouraged by the rare letters w, f and v which require special treatment, but eventually I found a solution in Webster's Second (and seven of the eight words are even more common). The square is given on the left, followed by several variants:

FLAW   FLAW    FLEW    FLAW   FLAW

RIVE   RIVA    RIVA    RAVI   RAVE

AMEN   AMEN    AMEN    AMEN   AMIN

PAST   PEST    PAST    PEST   PEST

DAVE MORICE 

Iowa City, Iowa