Large Print Cryptograms for Seniors

300 large print cryptograms, each a real quotation with its author named. No letter ever stands for itself, and every puzzle has 3 hints.

This book is for a solver who has done the newspaper cryptoquote for years and now finds the print too small, and for the daughter or son who buys it for a mother who enjoys word puzzles. The goal is a puzzle you can read without a magnifier and never have to argue with: a real quotation, copied word for word from its source, in code letters set at 18 points. You work with a pencil: write the letter you think a code letter stands for on the line above it, and above every copy of it in the puzzle, until the quotation and its author appear. It makes a gift for a mother who has finished her last puzzle book, or put it down because the print was too small.

What's inside:

• 300 puzzles from 136 authors. Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Ambrose Bierce, William Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson are among them. The author's name is in code too, so it is part of the puzzle.
• No letter stands for itself. A computer program made every cipher, hint and solution, and a second program checked all 300 puzzles: no letter stands for itself, and every given letter and every hint is a letter in its puzzle.
• Quotations copied word for word. Each one comes from John Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, ninth edition, or from the work itself as published by Project Gutenberg. The source is printed with each solution.
• Letters you can read and write over. Code letters are bold 18-point type, with a short line above every letter for your pencil, two puzzles to a page on 8.5 x 11 inch pages.
• Words you can tell apart. A wide space separates each word from the next, and no word is split at the end of a line.
• Punctuation where it belongs. Commas, periods and apostrophes are printed in the puzzle. In lines of verse, a slash marks where one line ends and the next begins.
• Four levels of 75. Warm-Up with 3 letters given, Easy with 2, Medium with 1, and Hard with none. A row of 4 dots on each puzzle shows its level.
• 3 hints for every puzzle, in three rounds. At the back, each round gives one more letter, by puzzle number. Take the first round, and turn to the next only if you need another letter. Each puzzle page prints the pages of its hints and of its answer.
• A two-page guide at the front. How to read the page, and three ways in: short words, the apostrophe, and counting letters.
• Solutions by puzzle number, in the same 18-point type, each with its source.

What it is not. It is not a quick, easy book from cover to cover: the 75 Hard puzzles have no letters given. Every quotation is from a writer of the past, with no modern sayings. It is a paperback, not spiral-bound, so it does not lie flat on its own.

Pick up a pencil, start at Warm-Up or go straight to Hard, and take your time.