Through mathpuzzle.com, I discovered that the Cambridge Univesity Press is releasing a new series of books called The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library.  Over at the Cambridege Press blog, they are giving away some of the books to those who can solve some of Martin Gardner’s famous puzzles.

Smartkit has put together a puzzle book with 79 of the best puzzles from their site.  Check it out.

Through Brainwagon, I found a great book by Sam Loyd on mathpuzzle.com. The full title of the book is Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Trick, and Conundrums with Answers. Published in 1914, the work is now in the public domain and Ed Pegg, Jr. has graciously made it available on his site. On the site, you’ll find 193 high quality scans containing all of the books pages. It’s a little hard to look through, but the full illustrations are available this way. I haven’t had a chance to look through the whole book yet, but puzzles of all kinds are available.

I’ve discovered a new blog that links here authored by a young man named Winston Breen. Winston, as it turns out, is a fictional character from the book The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin. It’s a YA mystery novel that features a number of solvable puzzles. Quotes from the web site compare the novel to Encyclopedia Brown or a Da Vinci Code for young adults. From what I can see on the site, Winston Breen may be cooler than both of these. Don’t get me wrong. As a kid, I loved Encyclopedia Brown, but the smoking gun in his mysteries tended to be a misplaced word or a breach of etiquette. And I distinctly remember having a conversation once about The Da Vinci Code and how it would be great to have a similar book with real puzzles. Well, Winston Breen appears to be just that.

The book has a section that allows you to download puzzles from the book. Presumably so that you can download them and print them out so that you won’t have to write in the book. The puzzles are available now to anyone, although the book won’t be out for some months. The instructions for these puzzles are incomplete, but you can still get a good sense of them. There’s a good variety of puzzles here. Definitely for a younger crowd, but I’m still impressed.

While we wait for the book to come out, there’s Winston’s blog. Right now, the only insight we get into Winston’s character is that he loves puzzles. Currently, there are two posted and his blogroll lists a number of puzzle sites, including this one.

Writer, blogger, and puzzle enthusiast Debra Hamel has created a puzzle contest to celebrate the first anniversary of Buy A Friend A Book, a website aimed at promoting quarterly Buy A Friend A Book Weeks when readers are encouraged to buy books for people for no reason (other than the fact that it’s Buy A Friend A Book Week.)

The contest consists of seven puzzles of a variety of types that will appear on seven different sites over the seven days of the next BAFAB Week (July 1-7.) The list of sites where the puzzles will appear can be found on the BAFAB site. To win the competition, you will have to submit a correct answer to all seven puzzles by 10:00 AM PDT on July 8th. The winners will be chosen randomly from all correct submissions. And yes, there are prizes for the winners.

It should be fun. I’ll certainly be playing.

Back when I wrote my first post on sudoku variations, I mentioned chess variations at the very end. Today I came across someone has written a book called Chessudoku and is publishing it with lulu.

From the sample pages, the book looks promising. The author, Matthew Skala, has come up with a few different variations (and in some cases has written little stories to go with them.) For example, one puzzle requires you to place the digits 1-8 and a chess knight with the added constraint that no two knights can attack each other. There is a similar puzzle with 8 knights and a queen.

The book is selling for $3.50 and contains 351 puzzles which seems very resonable for a sudoku book.