Something different - Lapointe and Perec

Not being able to sleep much has its small rewards... such as having time to spend in seemingly futile brain teasers, mind games and other "exercises" that, maybe because of the general exhaustion, I find quite amusing.

I was listening to a few old recordings by Boby Lapointe, a 50s-60s French singer, master of clever alliterations and plays on words. For some reason the lyrics of "Ta Katie t'a quitte" reminded me that I had read somewhere that he had introduced a bi-bi-binary system that would make manipulating large numbers a pleasure.
His system was basicaly an hexadecimal system (base 16 = base 2 ^ 2 ^ 2 ... no wonder Lapointe would focus on base 16 given his love for alliterations...), for which he defined a complete symbol set and corresponding pronunciation.
With this system, something like "119" + "137" = "256" would become "bibi" + "koka" = "hahoho" (thanks Google).
Much better...

Following hyperlinks reading that stuff, I stumbled upon references to other language games. In particular the famous (in the French speaking world) book written by Perec (La Disparition) that not only fully avoids using the letter "e" in a 300+ pages work, but also is largely self referential, discussing as part of its plot the disappearance of said letter [http://www.amazon.fr/Disparition-Georges-Perec/dp/207071523X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227261348&sr=8-3].
This is a brilliant technical achievement: in French, around 85% of the words that you would ever write will have the letter "e" in it (with or without accentuation).
Furthermore, the result is a book you would read: an interesting plot, constructed characters, etc. I read it many years ago, after a teacher gave me a copy of the book after challenging me to write a formal essay with the same challenge (I could not go beyond three pages in one hour, and barely articulated a very limited argumentation).
Georges Perec loved these formal challenges, very similar in nature to what Boby Lapointe did in songs.

The same teacher mentioned earlier also introduced me to the French poetry from the Baroque period - a lot of the same alliterations and plays on words. I still have in my brain somewhere the first verses of Pierre de Marbeuf's "La mer et l'amour ont l'amer pour partage".

In any case, I love this stuff.

I would love to find the equivalent kind of work in English. Recommendations?