Time Cryptograms
Quotes about time, encoded as substitution ciphers and laid out for paper — big type, a blank under every letter, answers on their own page.
Twelve quotations about hours, days and putting things off, running from Marcus Aurelius and Seneca through Shakespeare, Franklin, Emerson, Dickens and Twain. Two of them say almost the same thing eight hundred years apart, which is the sort of accident that makes a subject set worth building: Franklin's line about tomorrow and the older proverb behind it sit on the same sheet, encoded with different keys, so they do not look alike until you have solved both.
Time words are short and repetitive — day, hour, year, late, soon, now — and they repeat within a single quotation more often than most vocabulary does. That gives you repeated shapes early, which is a genuine advantage; the compensating difficulty is that several of these lines are built as a comparison, so a wrong guess in the first clause propagates cleanly into the second and looks plausible all the way.
A good set for a waiting room, ironically enough. The shortest is forty-one letters and the longest eighty-two, so a sheet takes about as long as an appointment runs late.
This section: 12 quotations, written between 49 and 1904, 41 to 82 letters long, graded easy / medium / hard / expert. Voices you will meet: Benjamin Franklin, Charles Dickens, Marcus Aurelius, Mark Twain, Proverb, Ralph Waldo Emerson and 2 more.
The 2 sheets
Every sheet prints on US Letter with half-inch margins, gives you a blank line under each cipher letter, and keeps the answer key on its own page so nothing is spoiled while you work.