 | Maze: Solve the World's Most Challenging Puzzle by Christopher Manson
Buy new: $7.88 / Used from: $0.01 The king of all the single-puzzle books. This ain't your daddy's "maze."
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 | The Practical Alchemist: Showing the Way an Ordinary House-Cat May Be Transformed into True Gold, by Means of Divers Methods and Practices, Heer Mo by Christopher Manson
Buy used from: $0.01 Far less fiendish than "The Maze," but still a challenge. It's like those word-ladder puzzles... but it runs through the entire book.
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| The Rails I Tote: Forty-Five Illustrated Spoonerisms to Decipher (Owl Books) by Christopher Manson
Buy used from: $0.01 A refreshing break from Manson's more cerebral books. Buy your tressed and you may curl your hairs away.
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| The Egyptian Jukebox: A Conundrum by Nick Bantock
Buy used from: $0.05 This little conundrum isn't one of those enigmas that will suck up a lifetime (I finished it after a solid day's work), but it is still very satisfactory, and attractive too.
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 | The Merlin Mystery by Jonathan Gunson
Buy used from: $0.01 This one I still haven't solved. Apparently nobody else has either. Finish it before Dec. 31, 2001 and you can claim a huge prize.
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 | Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained by Kit Williams
Buy used from: $46.75 The book that inspired "The Merlin Mystery," this was one of the first books to give clues to a treasure buried by the author in the real world.
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 | Eleventh Hour by Graeme Base
Buy new: $9.32 / Used from: $1.02 Unlike the other books on this list, "The Eleventh Hour" is a children's book. But adults will enjoy working through the puzzle with their kids.
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 | The Code Book: The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary, Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptography by Simon Singh
Buy used from: $1.85 This book is primarily a history of cryptography, but at the end of the book the author gives a chain of 10 very tough codes to break. The $15,000 prize has been claimed, but the fun remains.
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 | The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes: Fifty Tantalizing Problems of Chess Detection by Raymond M. Smullyan
Buy used from: $10.02 Not your typical chess puzzles. Holmes engages here in "retrograde analysis": looking at positions and deducing earlier moves. Fun and lively.
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