Part 1 of the endgame puzzle is to identify 26 clued book titles that are 1-letter changes from actual, well-known book titles. The 26 letter changes range from A to Z. The books to identify, in alphabetical order of their letter changes, are:
| CLUE | CHANGED TITLE | ORIGINAL TITLE | LETTER |
|---|---|---|---|
| An imprisoned troubadour spills the beans, and yours truly is aware of his reasons. | I Know Why the Caged Bard Sings | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | A |
| A gift of fake chocolate is found under the tree. | A Christmas Carob | A Christmas Carol | B |
| A manual on providing pachyderms' parties with food. | Cater for Elephants | Water for Elephants | C |
| Minters develop an apparatus for producing small coins. | The Dime Machine | The Time Machine | D |
| A frat for downy ducks is way cool! | The Eider House Rules | The Cider House Rules | E |
| A study of the more than 99 new phobias discovered during the COVID lockdown. | One Hundred Fears of Solitude | One Hundred Years of Solitude | F |
| A hilarious farce about the careers of Greg Louganis and Chen Ruolin. | The Diving Comedy | The Divine Comedy | G |
| Degrees of extreme anger are charted in easy-to-read visuals. | The Graphs of Wrath | The Grapes of Wrath | H |
| A boy completely botches every attempt to make a flying toy. | The Kite Ruiner | The Kite Runner | I |
| On a far off planet, summer has begun. | June | Dune | J |
| Someone sleeping is occasionally roused, but really not very often. | Little Woken | Little Women | K |
| An FBI agent investigating the paranormal travels from Paris to Istanbul. | Mulder on the Orient Express | Murder on the Orient Express | L |
| A beaver's home is reduced to dregs. | The Remains of the Dam | The Remains of the Day | M |
| A punctuation mark is printed in violet. | The Colon Purple | The Color Purple | N |
| A cautionary tale about how easily revealing bikini bottoms disintegrate. | Thongs Fall Apart | Things Fall Apart | O |
| A discussion of water levels of particular interest to gondoliers. | Depth in Venice | Death in Venice | P |
| A compilation of a tumultuous throng's common queries. | FAQ from the Madding Crowd | Far from the Madding Crowd | Q |
| Samuel Adams and others lead a day-to-day existence the details of which are covert. | The Secret Life Of Beer | The Secret Life of Bees | R |
| One's soundness of mind is ... fine. | Sanity Fair | Vanity Fair | S |
| Kids have high hopes for their Halloween haul. | Treat Expectations | Great Expectations | T |
| A depiction of a smelly tropical fruit becomes rotten and gross, while the original remains fresh. | The Picture of Durian Gray | The Picture of Dorian Gray | U |
| A young royal is charged with providing grub. | The Vittle Prince | The Little Prince | V |
| Uatu manifests between slices of deli bread. | The Watcher in the Rye | The Catcher in the Rye | W |
| A treatise on the milieu of Madame Tussaud. | The Art Of Wax | The Art Of War | X |
| A schedule of occasions on which one mows grass, plays croquet, works in the garden, etc. | Yard Times | Hard Times | Y |
| Actor Ribisi hosts an online meeting. | Giovanni's Zoom | Giovanni's Room | Z |
Each book title gives solvers a page of their story through the Hunt. But their story is not complete – in part 2 of the endgame puzzle, solvers must complete their story by adding one word to each page, Printer’s Devilry style. (The first page, when the pages are arranged in A through Z order based on the chart above, suggests that words must be added, and mentions PRINT and DEVIL)
The words to be added are “something you have seen during your time here,” and these turn out to be a subset of the 1-word answers to puzzles encountered previously in the Hunt. With the pages arranged in A to Z order as above, the missing solutions to the Printer’s Devilry items are:
| During our darkest hour, a band of intrepid puzzlers -- once strangers, now friends -- arrived from afar and saved all of Bookspace. We know we can never repay you, but perhaps if we inscribe here in print your devil-may-care exploits, it will serve as some small token of our great affection. If we have left out something you have seen during your time here, we're sure you can fill it in. Toward the beginning of your adventure you wandered through our Rows Garden, and were able to enjoy the splendor of our arbors there, where bungee cords help rest(RAIN BOW)ers to keep them from falling and to increase the available shady space. |
| You helped deprive moles of their livelihood while they were trying to cheat others out of their money, following the principle that it's better to Ro(B A CON)man before he can do it to you. |
| You were even able to play matchmaker several times, and in case you didn't know, a couple you paired made off with a large jug of wine, drank a gal(LON, E)loped without telling anyone, and then went on a honeymoon in exciting Reference Point (hey, the heart wants what it wants). |
| It must have been fate that you decided to solve puzzles this weekend rather than visit some s(KI LO)cale like Stowe or Vail. |
| You waded through a slew of musical theater works, where in some cases composers had to, for some of the lyrical part(S TAP LER)ner or another famous librettist for the job of helping make the songs complete. |
| In a visit to our Southern hemisphere, you palled around with some locals at a bar, where you may have noticed that the brews were served on Platonic solid platters -- on your next visit you should really try some of their cu(BE TRAY AL)es. |
| You were humbled to be accompanied by Tock, the Watchdog; if he had been unavailable at the start you would have been met instead by his assistants, all of whom have pocket watches on thin braided ropes, with whom you would have travelled Bookspace while their timepieces on lan(YARDS TICK)ed the time away. |
| You tested your hand at preparing food in Recipeoria, though never had a chance to make a Portuguese beef / pickling herb / Dutch cheese sandwich, since no customer asked for that delectable combination of arou(QUESA, DILL, A)nd Edam. |
| At the star-studded Heartford masquerade ball, you fortunately avoided meeting up with one of the actors from Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, who would have deluged you with no end of information about the various fish oils and sources of other o(MEGAS TUDY)k recommends. |
| Stymied staff were once again able to wai(T ON GUE)sts looking for a meal, once you were able to help with Lou's wall of words in Recipeoria. |
| You encountered a toy chest containing some foil balloons, which you were wise to keep away from sharp objects, since after encountering a punctu(RE CESS)ation of their ability to float would occur. |
| You even created a Monopoly board -- hopefully a fair one since players looking to make a property pur(CHASE R)ely on the relative propriety of the prices. |
| You swiftly saw through sneaky pearls dressed in gar(B ROOK)s and knights might sport. |
| Your instruction-laden multicar road trip throughout Whoston will long be remembered -- hopefully at the end you remembered to take all your belongings and return your rental car with the back seat and tr(UNK EMPT)y. |
| You figured out how to( ADD LE)tters on the faces of dice and tumble them to spell words leading to LOVE. |
| You participated in a tournament bracket of amazing names, which involved quite a rough fuss before a medal recipient emerged, but you stayed with it to watch the eventual victor after that Har(SH ADO WIN G)old. |
| You chomped right through several anagramming challenges with no hesitation -- you must really have eaten your Alp(HA-BIT)s this morning! |
| When visiting NoirLeans, you did not find a lacrimal sha(MUS TARD)y but instead located them right on time. |
| We're so fortunate you had someone in your group that had spent months playing w(HIST OR Y)ears playing bridge, and were able to solve that card puzzle without a hitch. |
| You realized that holes were the key to a nametag puzzle, for which what you need, if you decide to preserve the tags in that puzzle long term i(S A LAMI)nator to protect them from damage. |
| You braved your way through some image-manipulated fish, whose blend of Expressionism, Cubism, and Abstractism perhaps reminded you not so much of general works of some random Bauhaus instructor but rather of several very speci(FIC KLE)es. |
| You spent some exciting moments in NoirLeans, even though you only encountered Sherlock Holmes in passing, as he was investigating a f(LAT HE)ist a few blocks from his residence after someone reported their apartment had been looted. |
| You did not even need to consult the files where they sto(RE CORD ANT)ics to figure out some tricky problems in knot theory -- knot theory! -- based on looking at the escapades of loops that might be made from strings. |
| While roaming the streets of NoirLeans, you managed to avoid the seedier side of town and thus did not encounter the bakery truck on its way to deliver the daily br(OTHEL LO)aves allocated to the town's Madam and her crew. |
| On those rare occasions when you were flagging you smartly understood you could go ahead and gra(SP ICED)d coffee in both hands for something cold and refreshing to help keep you awake for a few extra hours. |
| And finally you, once finished with the main itinerant part of your tre(K, LINGER)ed here a while to reminisce, pull together a few last loose ends, and then find your way back to your own land. You are now part of our history, and we yours. We are grateful for the difference you have made within our borders. We truly hope that, having helped write yourself into Bookspace's story, you'll have discovered how to return home and continue your own. |
With 26 words in proper order, all that’s left is to find an index. The final paragraph of the story talks about being “grateful for the difference you have made within our borders.” The borders of the pages consist of repetitions of the same leafed branch, except in 1 to 6 cases on each page a branch has been flipped so that its 1-leafed side is facing inward rather than its 2-leafed side. Use the number of flipped branches on a page as an index to extract a letter from the devilry word added to that page. Extracting those 26 letters -- from RAINBOW, BACON, LONE, etc. as arranged in A to Z order of the book title letter changes in part 1 of the endgame – spells out the final answer phrase and the way to return to the MIT campus: BOOK PASSAGE HOME WITH LITCOIN.