I received galley copies of the Gathering for Gardner (G4G7) Exchange Book today from Tom Rodgers.
It's got to be at least 700 pages of the coolest stuff on magic, puzzles, recreational math, and games. People really outdid themselves on their contributions. At the beginning of the book, there was exactly what I'd hope to find, somewhere, in it—Scott Kim's renderings of many of the participants' names as ambigrams.
I'm still amazed at how easily he dispatched my name
From the introduction by Jeremiah Farrell:
Are you a completist? Or perhaps you prefer to be a preservationist. If a completist you will cut, bend, fold, and generally mutilate these exchanges from the Seventh Gathering for Gardner by trying to solve every last puzzle or problem contained therein. Completists preserve nothing.
On the other hand complete, pristine sets from earlier Gatherings have become very, very collectible and apparently very expensive. I have heard that one copy of the spiral bound first exchange was sold recently for several thousand dollars. It was assembled by Scott Kim on January 16, 1993 with help from Tom Rodgers and Dana Richards. I don't know the details of the sale.[...]
Shortly after G4G7 Karen and I decided to visit Mr Gardner in Norman, OK. We found him in good health and, although he rarely travels, very active. He has just completed a new book on wordplay and has sent it to a publisher. A long review of E. Brian Davies' Science in the Looking Glass: What do Scientists Really Know? occurred in the AMS Notices (Vol 52, No. 11) [another link to an article by Davies in the same issue].Also the MAA has contracted with Cambridge University Press to reissue all the columns of "Mathematical Games" in hardbound editions at the rate of two per year. "These will be reset so I am able to update all of them," Gardner excitedly exclaimed. He was working on the updates when we visited.
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