About the book
In 1893 Professor Hoffmann — the man who had taught England how to write down a conjuring trick — tried to put every puzzle he could find into one volume. He got a long way, and discovered in the doing why nobody had managed it.
This edition prints five chapters complete and unaltered from the first edition, set from the Boston Public Library copy: the chapters whose puzzles need nothing but the page in front of you and a little patience. Every figure has been redrawn for this edition rather than reproduced from the scan, so a diagram is legible at reading size instead of being a grey smear of 1893 halftone.
Original to this edition: an introduction placing Hoffmann among his contemporaries, head-notes orienting each chapter, difficulty ratings, a glossary, a register of the text's own claims, and an index. The 1893 text is in the public domain; the apparatus is © Valice Press and is declared to Amazon as AI-generated text under human editorial direction.
102 pages, 6 × 9 in.
