Ed Pegg Jr, of the excellent MathPuzzle.com, has put up a complete set of scans of a profusely illustrated classic from 1914 containing 5000 unique puzzles.

Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles.

If the name Sam Loyd isn’t familiar to you, perhaps it should be. Loyd was the inventor of the sliding 15-tile puzzle. Here’s my own Flickr-powered version of the 15 puzzle.

Warning: Some of the illustrations and text is politically incorrect by today’s standards. Consider this informative gem: “The chinese are wonderfully expert at figures, although in some way or other they seem to do everything backwards…”

Oh yes, some of the puzzles in the book have been selected as ‘prize puzzles.’ “A prize of one hundred ($100) dollars will be awarded to the person who sends in the best set of correct answers to these ‘Prize Puzzles’ before the first of January, 1915.”

Better get cracking!

Link courtesy of Anarchaia.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Linkydinks, Puzzles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.