It's good to be popular. I wrote down a list of books I wanted to read on a card, but someone came in after I had finished and changed part of the titles to suggest a title I forgot. What was it?

The Lion, the Witch, and New Apparel
The Sun Up There
The Red Massive Achievement
Gone with Breezy Draft
All Quiet on the Eastern Edge
The Grapes of Rage Maker
The Sound and the Fur of Animals
One Flew From the Bird's Home

Looking at the modifications to the titles, their first letters spell out the words NUMBERoF and their last letters spell out the words letterse. So we look at the number of letters e in each modified title. For example the first title has four, so we take the fourth letter of that title, which is L, and so on.

This gives the letters: LEDNIGHF, which immediately suggest the name H.FIELDING, with one 'I' omitted. 

Using the suggestion 'number of letters e' again, we seek a title whose number of letters e corresponds with an occurence of the letter I in that title.

It is at this point that I see difficulties.

First there are now two well known authors called H. Fielding - Henry, the author of Tom Jones, and Helen, the author of Bridget Jones. We can of course make some assumptions about the puzzler's reading preferences from his other choices.

Second, there is no notable work of the celebrated founder of London's first police force that completes the pattern, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Fielding; probably the closest is Joseph Andrews, the full title of which is sometimes given as 'The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews' with the letter I in position 5*, missing by just one letter. However the full title is 'The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams' which contains 7 letters e, for a surplus of 2. 'Bridget Jones's Diary' on the other hand has an I in position 3 which is only out by 1 and so is the closest near miss.

We could of course assume that 'someone' has also mauled the missing title, even though in that case the acrostics would cease to work when the final title is added. In that case we could have 'Bridget Jones's [Giant Knickers]', or 'The History of Tom Jones, a[n Entertainer].'

The problem is also open to quite different interpretations. The acrostic of the words Apparel, There, Achievement... produces an anagram of METADATA, which suggests a title concerning library management or computerised document retrieval, possibly Dewey's seminal A Classification and Subject Index for Cataloguing and Arranging the Books and Pamphlets of a Library ; surely a must-read on any booklist?

There is no requirement that the last title should actually exist, save perhaps in the Library of Babel. Hence those letters plus the unused lower case letters could be used to produce the well known Waterloo memoir 'Aha, mated Ney weeps!' by the first Duke of Wellington. If one assumes some carelessness of calligraphy, and given the month, a plausible reading of 'New Apparel' is 'Nov. Apparel', suggesting, consistently with the first title in the list, Philip Pullman's 'Pevensey, A Mad Hate'.

Then again, 'number of letters e' is not that specific. Suppose that it is merely an invitation to add a tltle that has the same number of letters e as one of the existing (real) titles {2, 4, or 5}? Note that the last (modified) title is unique in having four words added rather than two. So if we chose, say, Daphne Du Maurier's 'The Apple Tree', we would not only have complied with the said invitation, but also have chosen a book that, like the last title given, contains 'The Birds'.

Then again again, perhaps the puzzler had in mind a book wherein the number of letters e is itself constrained. Such books include Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E", by E.V.Wright, and Perec's La Disparition.

I await publication of the official solution with considerable interest.

* There is also The Historical Register for the Year 1736, but that is a play rather than a book, and is hardly well-known.

Edited on November 30, 2010, 4:02 am

Posted by broll on 2010-11-30 02:27:37