A sequel

I could not resist doing a sequel to Puzzling Typography: Mazes with Letter Tessellations. It was not because Puzzling Typography was selling so well. It was not--mazes are a niche market, and I doubt if any maze books sell very well. Rather it was because I had become obsessed with letter tessellations and I kept discovering new ones, either new shapes or new ways of arranging old shapes. I was a little worried that I might not be able to do a book with the same quality as the original, but as time went on, that worry disappeared.

It took a month and and a half, but now Puzzling Typography A Sequel: Mazes with Tessellating Letters is available on Amazon.

The book has the same format as the original. There are 84 pages of mazes and 21 pages showing the solutions. Each letter of the alphabet is represented at least once. More of the pages in the sequel are given to lower-case letters than were devoted to lower-case letters in the the original. Many of the shapes are the same as in the original, but the way they fit together is different, but there are also some new shapes. The R-shape is one case where the shape in the sequel is better than in the original. I was prepared to use a rather strange-looking Z until at the last minute I discovered a way to do a much better Z, one equal to the best in the first book.

The letter L is the letter for which I found the most tessellation patterns, with 21 pages in the two books devoted to them, plus one back cover. After finding many ways to tessellate the letter T in the first book, I struggled to find new ways in the second, but the letter F proved to be more productive than I expected.

I am unaware of any source that gives a larger collection of letter tessellations than what is contained in these two books. Because some mazes have two or three different tessellation patterns in them, there are about 180 different patterns in the two books; no pattern used in the first book is repeated in the second. Even so, I realize that I may have only scratched the surface of what is possible in letter tessellations.