(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

[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.