(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.