Recent Posts

As I departed TSR on the last day of 1985, I can not comment on anything thereafter.

No, I have no idea as to what was then being planned by TSR. From a speculative standpoint, I would suggest that TSR was then seeking another hit with a hardbound supplement to AD&D, but before it was completed Williams directed that AD&D Second Edition be done instead. As she was much opposed to me, she undoubtedly wanted to stop production of the original books, as I received royalties from their sale.

Labyrinthian Way
By Martin Gardner
July 27, 1975

Why children and adults in the United States should develop a sudden hankering for mazes is a mystery. Increasing leisure naturally demands new time wasters, but that can't be the whole story. Is it because millions feel trapped in various kinds of labyrinths—religious, moral, economic, political—and finding a way out of a paper maze somehow helps relieve anxiety? That might apply to adults, but hardly to children. Perhaps it is just a case of publishers discovering an—interest that children have had all along.

Of about 30 paperback books of mazes now on sale, Grosset & Dunlap has the lion's share. Thirteen of this publisher's books are by Vladimir Koziakin, a 31‐year‐old artist of Russian descent. His MAZES FOR FUN, volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4 ($1 each), in coloring‐book format, and the smaller ABC MAZES (75 cents) feature pictorial designs for small children. For older children he has three pocket‐size books: ASTRO MAZES (95 cents), MYSTERY MAZES (95 cents) and DINOSAUR MAZES (75 cents). For those who prefer more challenging puzzles there are the abstract labyrinths in his middle‐size books, MAZES, volumes 1 through 5 ($1.95 each). Their striking patterns are arranged in order of increasing complexity, each bearing a rated time limit from a few [text missing]

In addition to his maze books, the indefatigable Koziakin, surely the world's top maze artificer, draws a maze a week for The National Enquirer. From Gameophiles Unlimited (16 Pine Street, Morristown, N.J., 07960) you can obtain his 6‐foot‐long wall labyrinth, on vinyl, and his jigsaw puzzle maze.

Jacques Chazaud, a Frenchborn book designer, has four maze books to his credit: MONSTER MAZES, MORE MONSTER MAZES, STRANGE AND AMAZING MAZES and STORYBOOK MAZES (Grosset & Dunlap (75 cents each). The third book is no more than a compilation from the first two, but the picture mazes in the last book are new. Troubador Press, in San Francisco, is getting into the act with three books: MAZE CRAZE, volumes 1, 2 and 3 ($1.50 each). The first, by Ruth Heller, has only absract shapes. John Hull designed the other two.

Greg Bright's THE GREAT MAZE BOOK (Pantheon, $2.50), first published in London and now available here, is the largest and handsomest of the maze books. Bright was a young rock musician in England until his passion for labyrinths got the upper hand. Punch has called his patterns “fiendishly difficult,” and caricaturist Al Hirschfeld has paid tribute to their dazzling Op Art qualities. The book includes aerial photographs of Bright's Pilton Maze, a work of “earth art” that took him a year to dig in a field near Glastonbury. Bright is presently designing an outdoor maze, with bridges and underpasses, for Lord Weymouth's estate, at Longleat. Pantheon has his “The Great Maze Book II” on its fall list.

For those who prefer less conventional mazes there are some excellent volumes. Walter Shepherd's MAZES AND LABYRINTHS (Dover, $1.35) and BIG BOOK OF MAZES AND LABYRINTHS (Dover, $2) feature designs based on numbers, letters, dominoes, barbed wire and other unlikely things. Similar disguises are exploited by Lee Daniel Quinn in MAZES FOR THE MASTERMIND (Hart, $1.95).

The best of all the unorthodox maze books are by Rick and Glory Brightfield, two young graphic artists. In their AMAZING MAZES and MORE AMAZING MAZES (Harper/ Colophon, $1.95 each) and BRIGHTFIELD MAZES I (Barnes & Noble, $1.95) you will find labyrinths masquerading as mushrooms, flowers, fish, birds, clouds, butterflies and abstract patterns as delightfully eyetwisting as they are ingenious. These are not just crooked roads inside a border that resembles something. The path” itself is so artfully concealed that finding your way through a Brightfield maze is almost a new kind of cerebral experience.

If you want to increase your pleasure in solving mazes, the first thing not to do is draw on the paper. Morons can be taught to solve a maze by shading blind alleys and detours until Only a solution path is left. You should always work a maze with a toothpick or match, and not consider it mastered until you can touch the match to the starting spot and slide it unerringly to the goal.

Solving a maze that is spread before you is, of course, much easier than walking a hedge maze, like the famous English maze at Hampton Court. However, Greg Bright suggests a clever way to simulate such walking. Cut a small circular hole in the center of a sheet of cardboard. Place the hole over the starting pot. Now by sliding the cardboard, never seeing more than the spot along which you “walk,” try to find a path to the goal!

The colorful history of mazes, from ancient Egypt to the present, is detailed in W. H. Matthews's scholarly work MAZES AND LABYRINTHS (Dover, $2.50). The popularity of mazes on the walls and floors of medieval cathedrals can certainly be attributed to their mix of decorative art and religious metaphor. The “forced path” maze, in which there is no possibility of getting lost, is a splendid symbol of predestination. The puzzle maze, with its forking paths, is an equally dramatic symbol of free will. The best road to take, as you tramp through life, is narrow and with many turnings. Choose unwisely and you find yourself in blind alleys that

Such analogies surely must lie subliminally, like Jungian archetypes, in any maze solver's mind. The fun of a maze is the excitement of getting lost, of finding a way back, and ultimately a way out or to a goal. The serpentine paths, like the twisted corridors of sin, convey a subtle flavor of dalliance. This is the romantic side of mazes, reflected in the legend of Rosamond's Bower, the maze in which King Henry II concealed his mistress, and in Shakespeare's “quaint mazes in the wanton green.”

But the labyrinth's most disturbing metaphor springs from the infernal possibility that there is no path to exit or goal. Such a maze is Kafka's Castle. It is the mad city in Jorge L. Borges's “The Immortal”—a city “so horrible that its mere existence . . . contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars.” To solve a paper maze is to escape, in a tiny symbolic way, from Nightmare. This is the dark secret hidden within every labyrinth. It is the secret that explains its eternal fascination.

I love the Boots of Banana Peel.