.Available from Amazon
From the Introduction:
Earlier this year I told my daughter-in-law, the mother of two young girls, that although none of my ten maze books sold well, the one with the theme of trains sold better than the others. Her reaction was that a book of princess mazes would outsell the train mazes. I was intrigued. Could someone who does not pay much attention to princess mania of young girls, in part because he dislikes the implicit message of much of it, design a princess maze book? However, having overcome the difficulties of designing a train-themed maze book, the project seemed not only doable, but an entertaining challenge as well.
In the 1990s I designed a maze construction set that consists of a group of computer programs to generate a variety of different types of mazes and a collection of typefaces to display these mazes. Over the years I have designed many of these special typefaces, and it was to this collection I turned in preparing this book. All but three of the mazes in this book are based on designs that have appeared in my other maze books. Most of them are built with tessellation patterns, patterns formed from a shape that fits together to fill the plane with no gaps.
Although almost all maze books have a theme, few have a story that connects the mazes. Unlike a traditional storybook in which the story comes first and illustrations are added later, this maze storybook was constrained by available designs. For example, my library has many bird and star designs but no shoe or tiara designs, which led to narratives that could be illustrated with birds and stars.
There are no solutions provided but all the mazes are simple enough that even a child can solve them with patience. The key to solving them is trial and error—if one path does not work, try another, and since there are limited numbers of paths, you will eventually find the right one. (The same is often true in life.) The advantage of omitting solutions is that more pages of mazes can be included. The expected audience of this book is girls old enough to control a pencil and young enough to enjoy princess fantasies. Some mazes will be difficult for very young princesses and other will seem too easy for older princesses.
Matthew Schenk created the awesome cover picture.
If you are interested in other maze books or if you would like to know more about how these mazes were generated, visit my web page at ingrimayne.com/mazes.
I hope you have as much fun reading the stories and working the mazes as I had in writing and designing them. I am sorry about the mistakes that remain, but an evil typo fairy often corrupts what I have written. Really.