Product Description

It’s win-win for the whole family: Kids love puzzles—and parents love their kids to love puzzles. Now from Puzzability—the premier puzzle-writing company whose mind-benders have appeared regularly in The New York Times and Disney Adventures, and repeatedly in The New Yorker and Martha Stewart Kids—comes a rich, original, and entertaining category-killer of a book with over 250 puzzles on every imaginable theme and subject.

Fully illustrated in color, here is a bonanza of mazes, word games, visual and logic puzzles, and more. With a full range of difficulty, but all totally solvable, the puzzles are not meant to be tests. In fact they’re engaging and humorous, as fun to work on as they are satisfying to solve. In Gray Matter, readers first solve a short crossword, then use the letters in the puzzle to crack a riddle. Hot Lines involves matching kids to their clothing—based on tan lines. Flea Circuit is an unusual maze that you find your way out of by jumping around the page like a flea. A scavenger hunt runs through the book—solve every puzzle to amass the clues and earn the bound-in certificate of achievement. (Yes, the honor system applies.)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8883 in Books
• Brand: Workman Publishing Company
• Published on: 2006-12-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .52" h x 8.40" w x 10.70" l, 1.19 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 194 pages

From the Back Cover
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING RIDDLES AND THE QUESTS OF SIR GLANCE-A-LOT

The Hole Story. Rhyme Wave. Jokers Wild. Bat Attitude. Reverse Gear . . . in all, an outrageously clever, colorful bonanza of more than 250 mind-teasing mazes, word games, visual puzzles, and much more. • Wind your way through the twisted cemetery gates in Dead End. • Match sunburned kids to their beach gear by examining their Hot Lines. • In It’s Astro-Logical, figure out which astronaut is asleep on the job. • Decipher the words that are shimmering underwater to get All Wet. • There are even puzzles within puzzles, like Crunch Time: rearrange every letter in the solved crossword to get the answer to the riddle.

About the Author
Puzzability was founded in 1996 by Robert Leighton (a New Yorker cartoonist), Mike Shenk, and Amy Goldstein, who have a combined 60 years of experience in the puzzle business. Puzzability is a puzzle-writing company that creates puzzles for Web sites, major newspapers and magazines, ads and packaging, game shows, and other media. Puzzability was founded in 1966 by Robert Leighton (a New Yorker cartoonist), Mike Shenk, and Amy Goldstein, who have a combined 60 years of experience in the puzzle business. Puzzability is a puzzle-writing company that creates puzzles for Web sites, major newspapers and magazines, ads and packaging, game shows, and other media. The puzzle writing company! Puzzability was founded in 1966 by Robert Leighton (a New Yorker cartoonist), Mike Shenk, and Amy Goldstein, who have a combined 60 years of experience in the puzzle business. Puzzability is a puzzle-writing company that creates puzzles for Web sites, major newspapers and magazines, ads and packaging, game shows, and other media.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

This is no ordinary book. For one thing, you don’t write in an ordinary book. We heartily encourage you to write all over this one. For another thing, an ordinary book has chapters to be read in order—otherwise, you might find out “who done it” before you know what’s been done.

This book has sections where the order doesn’t matter— dive in wherever you like! The sections are hosted by different characters who will present different kinds of puzzles, so if you have a favorite type, you’ll know where to look. The book begins with Sir Glance-A-Lot, who presents the picture puzzles, followed by the Riddle Green Men, who ask questions of all sorts. Alice in Wanderland will take you through the mazes, The Wordman of Alcatraz is in charge of the word puzzles, and Sherlogic Holmes handles the logic and reasoning section.

Finally, there’s FrankEinstein, who looms over the section with the book’s toughest puzzles. (In the other sections, we haven’t said what’s easy or what’s hard because different people are better at different kinds of puzzles.) Like we said, this is no ordinary book. No ordinary book would make a point of telling you what to do if you get stuck. Novels aren’t known for offering advice to people who can’t follow the story. Atlases don’t say how to find your way home if you get lost, and dictionaries don’t tell you how to look up a word if you can’t already spell it (although they probably should).

So just in case you find yourself stuck along the way, here are some tips to keep in mind:

1. Read (or reread) the instructions. Why are some of the boxes different colors? What do the arrows mean? Should I cross off these words as I use them? Read the instructions, and you’ll find out. Sometimes a puzzle will have a bonus message that you won’t find unless you know how to look for it. Other times, two puzzles may look similar to each other but have different rules for solving.

2. You don’t always have to solve everything in the order it’s given. If you get stuck solving from top to bottom or left to right, just jump somewhere else and work your way out from there. Also, some puzzles have two parts (like many in the Riddle Green Men section, which reveal the answer to a riddle when you’re done). If you can solve some—but not all—of the first part, maybe you can use what you know to figure out some or all of the final answer. Then you can use that information to get the parts you skipped over.

3. Stop solving and come back to the puzzle later. If you find yourself trying the same thing over and over again, put the puzzle down. Sometimes all you need to do is come back later and the answer will suddenly pop out at you. (Your brain keeps working on it even though you’re doing other things.)

In case you’re permanently puzzled (or just want to check how you did), the answers are all in the back of the book. There you’ll also find a special foldout Scavenger Hunt that will have you searching cover-to-cover to solve one more super-puzzle, and a tear-out Certificate of Achievement that you can earn by solving the Scavenger Hunt.

As puzzle writers, we think that the best puzzles are not at all like tests. They’re sometimes tricky, often challenging, and always fun. But never ordinary.