Image in feature by Robert Alexander via Getty Images

You wake up slumped over a large table, your face in a book. You quickly banish memories of late night study sessions and try to make sense of the surroundings. There is a deliberate hush around the place, and bookshelves in every direction. You are quite glad to be chilling in a library after all your recent antics.

You see a woman carrying piles of books, crossing the library from one end to the other trying to find where they should go. When she has a break, she hurries back to her own desk where she’s working on what looks like poetry. You realise it’s Audre Lorde, and she is trying to write her first volume of poetry, The First Cities, while also working as a librarian!

You’re fairly certain the Dewey Decimal system is not that new, but it sure isn’t in use in this library. Instead, Audre has to use her knowledge of the library’s esoteric shelving scheme to work out where everything goes, which means it takes ages. She will never get her poetry written at this rate!

Photo by Robert Alexander/Archive Photos/Getty Images

Can you help Audre shelve all the books so she can work on completing her first book of poetry?

Audre has five books to shelve:

• The Complete Works of Sappho
• The Well of Loneliness
• A Raisin in the Sun
• The Price of Salt
• The Desert of the Heart

Each book needs to go into a separate area of the library: the north, south, east or west wings, or the central atrium.

Each area has a different loan period for its books: one area is reference-only, and the others have loan periods between 1 and 4 weeks.

From Audre’s crash course in the library’s layout you know that:

The library’s copy of Complete Works of Sappho is super old, so is for reference only.

The books in the west wing are taken out for an odd number of weeks

The Well of Loneliness is too controversial to be in the central atrium, but it does have the longest loan period

The books with 2 and 3 week loan periods are in opposite wings from each other

The Desert of the Heart can be checked out for twice as long as The Price of Salt

A Raisin in the Sun is in the south wing

It may help to use a grid like this:

A logic puzzle grid with 10 rows. The first 5 rows have 10 squares across. The last five rows are 5 squares across. The rows are labelled, from the top down: Sappho, Well of Loneliness, A Raisin in the Sun, The Price of Salt, Desert of the Heart, North, South, East, West, Central. The columns are labelled left to right as: reference, 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks, north, south, east, west, central

Mark what you know is true with a “O” and what can’t be true with an “X” and it will help you to eliminate options!

Which book is in the east wing?

Additional Tools:

A Printable Version of the Grid

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