(no subject)

[42itous]

This puzzle by selinker (known in the National Puzzlers' League as Slik) appeared in the Saturday-evening puzzle extravaganza at this year's NPL convention.

Each group of nine books can be divided into three groups: one linked by their authors, one by titles, and the third by cover images. Each group of three is part of a four-member set; figure out what the fourth word or phrase is in each set.

Table 1:


Table 2:


Table 3:


Table 4:


Table 5:


I apologize that not all the covers are legible: I tried to find an appropriate balance between legibility and overfilling your screen. If you ask me nicely, I'll send you a higher-resolution version of any or all images.
There was more to the puzzle, but it had to do with tying these answers in to a meta-puzzle encompassing the whole evening, and I think that sorting the books was the fun part of this puzzle.

PLEASE please don't post spoilers in the comments! I haven't solved the whole puzzle yet (I'm still missing six answers), and other readers of this post will want to solve from scratch.

Comments

[selinker.livejournal.com]

You are most awesomely awesome for posting this, Martha. It's more accurate to say that the puzzle was mostly written by me from a spirited group effort by all of us putting the concept together.

Here are the instructions:
Library
If there’s one thing Nerissa could never have too many of, it’s bookshelves. Some of her overflowing stacks are spread around the room. In each stack of nine books, there are three groups of three jumbled together. Each group of three is part of a common set of four, one group being defined by words from that set’s titles, one by names from that set’s authors, and one by images from that set’s covers. The missing word or phrase from each set of four is to be placed by stack number into the blanks below. The numbers given are indexes into those words and phrases, which will give you your auction items. (And remember, you can check out these books all you like, but you can’t check them out.)

TITLES
1 ________________________________________ (4)
2 ________________________________________ (9)
3 ________________________________________ (1)
4 ________________________________________ (3)
5 ________________________________________ (1)

AUTHORS
1 ________________________________________ (4)
2 ________________________________________ (8)
3 ________________________________________ (2)
4 ________________________________________ (1)
5 ________________________________________ (7)

COVERS
1 ________________________________________ (7)
2 ________________________________________ (4)
3 ________________________________________ (4)
4 ________________________________________ (3)
5 ________________________________________ (1)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

If Martha's images aren't hi-res enough and if you don't have better images yourself, I'm willing to do the legwork of getting images from Amazon and assembling them, in exchange for assurance that PDFs of the whole shebang will be available at some point.

[nurrynur.livejournal.com]

So stumped!! Any chance the indexes for the first two tables for Covers got mixed up? (actually 4 then 7?)

[selinker.livejournal.com]

Nope. They're in the right order.

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

This was the one puzzle I've most used as an example to describe what I did last weekend. I had a lot of fun solving it. I was surprised and disappointed, at one point, to approach one table and realize someone had grouped the books into their correct categories and left them there. (I immediately resorted them by height.)

[selinker.livejournal.com]

Argh. Come on now, people. Who does that?

Mike

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

May I please have the hi-res versions? If they're online somewhere, I can go get them... or email to mamagotcha@gmail.com

Thanks!

[42itous.livejournal.com]

Sent!

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

That's really a lovely puzzle.

For what it's worth, I was able to get all but one of them (in the fifth set), though some of them required Googling to get the author's name, or recognizing the cover and thus knowing the title/author without being able to read them, or else getting two out of the three and taking a guess at which was likely to be represented and which wasn't (to pick a non-actual example: given a picture of HANDS and a picture of a HEAD, I figured it was much more likely to be "heart" than "health" pictured on the third cover). So generally speaking: solvable, but it may take a little more work than it did on-site, and with luck Slik has higher-res pictures. (Or else someone can spend some time retrieving book cover images from Amazon.com.)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

And: I've gotten the one I was missing. So, yes, all solvable with a little work.

[nurrynur.livejournal.com]

I'm looking up each book on Amazon to get the title/author/better idea of the cover.. I'll post the title and author, so others don't have to do the same legwork. Cover interpretation is subjective and what I see might be different than others, so I'm not including that.

Table 1:
Why Can't Sharon Kowalski Come Home? / Karen Thompson and Julie Andrzejewski
Never Say Never: Ten Lessons to Turn You Can't Into Yes I Can / Phyllis George
Best Easy Day Hikes Salt Lake City / Brian Brinkerhoff
The Revolution: A Manifesto / Ron Paul
Perfect Murder Perfect Town: JonBenet and the City of Boulder / Lawrence Schiller
Santa Fe Dead / Stuart Woods
I am third / Gale Sayers with Al Silverman
Midnight Murders/Katherine John
Every Second Counts / Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins

[selinker.livejournal.com]

Here's the full list:

TABLE 1:
Why Can’t Sharon Kowalski Come Home?, by Karen Thompson
Never Say Never, by Phyllis George
Best Easy Day Hikes: Salt Lake City, by Brian Brinkerhoff & Greg Witt
The Revolution: A Manifesto, by Ron Paul
Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, by Lawrence Schiller
Santa Fe Dead, by Stuart Woods
I Am Third, by Gale Sayers
Midnight Murders, by Katherine John
Every Second Counts, by Lance Armstrong

TABLE 2:
Death Match, by Lincoln Child
The Devil’s Right Hand, by J.D. Rhoades
The Beauty and Lore of Coins, Currency, and Medals, by Elvira & Vladimir Clain-Stefanelli
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
Star Wars: A New Hope, by Bruce Jones
Christy Brown: The Life That Inspired My Left Foot, by Georgina Louise Hambleton
The Toilet of Doom, by Michael Lawrence
Cold Pursuit, by T. Jefferson Parker

TABLE 3:
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling
Democracy Matters, by Cornel West
American Spartans, by James A. Warren
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
Earth in the Balance, by Senator Al Gore
The Complete James Bond Movie Encyclopedia, by Steven Jay Rubin
Dogtown, by Elyssa East
Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie
The Jericho Sanction, by Oliver North

TABLE 4:
The Circulatory Story, by Mary K. Corcoran
Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser
The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry
Breaking the Slump, by Jimmy Roberts
The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
Brave Charlotte and the Wolves, by Anu Stohner
Miranda v. Arizona, by Gail Blasser Riley
The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
A Free and Ordered Space, by A. Bartlett Giamatti

TABLE 5:
Psycho Alley, by Nick Oldham
The Gas We Pass, by Shinta Cho
The Principia, by Sir Isaac Newton
The Various Flavors of Coffee, by Anthony Capella
Common Ground in a Liquid City, by Matt Hern
Documentary in American Television, by A. William Bluem
The Wizard of Rondo, by Emily Rodda
The Satanic Bible, by Anton Szandor LaVey
Book Yourself Solid, by Michael Port

Thanks Slik!

[serendipity-npl.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting the raw data. Since data gathering isn't part of the puzzle, you just saved me some time!

Re: Thanks Slik!

[selinker.livejournal.com]

I should probably say these are in order of the books in Martha's pictures, which is random and irrelevant. The order on each table probably changed multiple times per table during the extravaganza.

Also, you are looking for three items found in a library as your final answers.

[jbsegal.livejournal.com]

Do we need to see more details for the covers of the cover books — whichever they might be — than we can get off the Amazon images?

[selinker.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. The "objects" in question are generally the most dominant element of the cover art or photo. You should be able to get most of them just from Martha's photos, and the names and titles from the list I posted above. If you overthink the puzzle, you can go down a lot of false roads.

Mike

[selinker.livejournal.com]

The entire extravaganza, including Martha's hi-res photos, can be found here (http://sites.google.com/site/lotsofluck2010/). Enjoy!

Mike