PUZZL
Being a small volume of unsolved puzzles, compiled for the quiet hour
fol. i.r
On the Pleasure of an Unsolved Question
In the long history of reading, no chapter has been more deliberately overlooked than that of the riddle left open. The riddle that yields its answer is closed; it ceases to be a riddle and becomes, instead, a fact — a small grey object on the shelf of memory. But the riddle held in suspension, like a tea-leaf turning in cooling water, retains its essential property: that of inviting attention without demanding resolution.
Here we have gathered seven such riddles. They are not problems set for solving, but pages set for inhabiting — each a small territory of paper and ink wherein the visitor may pause, frown, retrace, and depart unsolved. The doubled PP of our colophon is itself one such riddle: are these two letters, or one letter twice declared, or a third sign hiding between them?
We hold no opinion on the matter. We have laid out the lines, drawn the rules, set the type, and opened the door. The reader, if reader they are, may sit.
fol. ii.v
Turn the pageThe First Riddle — Of an Impossible Triangle
Three roads meet, and each of them rises while the others descend. A ribbon, threaded through the meeting-place, returns to its origin without crossing itself. The traveller who walks the perimeter ascends without ever climbing, descends without ever falling, and finds upon completing the circuit that the cup of tea on the table beside the door is, by some negligence, still warm.
No one has solved this riddle. It is widely held that it cannot be solved — that the triangle is not a problem but a description, and the description is faithful to a place that does not, strictly speaking, exist. The bookmark is a separate matter. The bookmark, at least, is real.
The compiler invites the reader to spend an afternoon with this drawing. Trace it with the eye. Do not trace it with the finger; that way lies vertigo.
cipher: 03A7-FF1B shelfmark: PEN.iii.r
fol. iii.r
Turn the pageThe Second Riddle — Of the Teacup that Asks
A cup of black tea cools on the long oak table. The steam rises, and as it rises it traces the form of a question mark in the still air of the reading-room. The question is not posed. The question is not legible. But the form persists for the duration that steam ordinarily persists, and then is gone.
The compiler has sat at this table for a number of mornings now and has watched the question mark form itself faithfully each time. The cup is the same cup. The tea is the same tea. The room is the same room, the windows opening on the same pale Stockholm dawn. What does the steam know, that it asks the same question every morning and is never answered?
Possibly nothing. Possibly the question is not addressed to anyone in particular. The compiler has, in any case, taken to leaving the cup where it is and reading on.
cipher: B22F-AE08 shelfmark: TEA.iv.v
fol. iv.v
Turn the pagefol. v
Turn the pageThe Third Riddle — Of the Circle that Does Not Close
Place the point of a compass upon the page. Open the legs to a width comfortable to the hand. Inscribe a circle. Now, with the same compass, the same width, the same paper, the same wrist, attempt the second circle — and observe that it never quite returns to its origin. There is a gap, always, of perhaps two millimetres, perhaps less.
The compiler has tested this riddle on twelve fine compasses, including a brass instrument said to have belonged to Christopher Polhem. Each compass leaves the same small gap. Either every compass in Stockholm is faulty in precisely the same way, or there is no such thing as a circle, only a long arc that imagines its own closure.
The reader is invited to consider which of these conclusions is more troubling, and to leave the compass on the table.
cipher: D44C-1907 shelfmark: COM.vi.r
fol. vi.r
Turn the pageThe Fourth Riddle — Of the Paper Crane
A folded paper crane, set down on the manuscript-table at evening, is found at dawn unfolded. The unfolding has not been done by any hand. The paper, smoothed flat, reveals not the original blank sheet but a printed page of musical staves — five lines, four spaces, a treble clef in the upper-left corner, drawn in the same Stockholm Brick ink that the compiler uses for everything else.
There are no notes upon the staves. The staves are empty, and waiting. The compiler has tried to fold them back into a crane, and the crane will not form — the creases run in the wrong directions now, as though the paper has decided in the night which of its two careers it prefers.
The empty staves are reproduced in the appendix, which has not been printed.
cipher: 7B05-CF42 shelfmark: CRA.vii.v
fol. vii.v
Turn the pageThe Fifth Riddle — Of the Keyhole within a Keyhole
In the door at the end of the long oak corridor, there is a keyhole. The compiler, kneeling once to look through, observed that the keyhole did not open onto a room but onto another keyhole, smaller and identically shaped, set in a second door six inches behind the first.
Through the second keyhole, kneeling a little lower, the compiler observed a third — and through the third (suspected, not confirmed) a fourth, indistinct, perhaps imagined. The corridor of doors recedes into the warm darkness of the house, and the compiler has chosen not to bring a candle. There is a kind of riddle that is most usefully kept dim.
The keys, if any keys exist, are not the matter. The matter is the recursion of the doors.
cipher: 0E91-AB6F shelfmark: KEY.viii.r
fol. viii.r
Turn the page❦ ✶ ❦
PRINTED FOR THE WORLD−WIDE WEB
IN THE FIFTH MONTH OF MMXXVI
IN EB GARAMOND, IBM PLEX MONO,
AND UNIFRAKTURMAGUNTIA
ON A FIELD OF ALDINE PARCHMENT
SET BY HAND BY THE COMPILER
AT THE SIGN OF THE DOUBLED P
❦ ✶ ❦
fol. ix