Art Cryptogram Puzzles — 19 to Decode

The art quotes come from people who made things for a living and were sceptical about being solemn while they did it — Picasso and Chaplin alongside cartoonists like Bill Watterson and Charles Schulz, and performers from Judy Garland to Lily Tomlin. The subject is making and seeing: what is worth putting into the world, and how differently the world looks once you have started paying attention to it.

As cryptograms they sit right in the comfortable middle. Longer than a lyric, shorter than a page of philosophy, written in plain concrete words with hardly a proper noun to trip over — which matters, because names are the one thing a letter-substitution cipher gives you no help with. If you want somewhere to practise counting frequencies and testing a guess before committing to it, this is the category to do it in.

It is the most compact collection here, weighted more toward the studio and the stage than the gallery wall. Fewer puzzles, but they are the ones that earned their place.