With the festive season again upon us, I am happy to help by suggesting a range of modestly priced Guardian and Guardian-related puzzle things for you to choose as gifts:

* Eric Westbrook’s 3-D crossword puzzle calendar. Each month has its own puzzle. As a bonus it is linked online to a monthly prize competition and a newsletter for the solutions. There is a program available for downloading that enables totally blind solvers to take part. Of the home team, Arachne, Enigmatist, Nutmeg, Pasquale, Picaroon, Puck and Rufus have each set one of the 12 puzzles. Of each purchase price of £12.99 £5 goes to the BBC Children in Need Appeal, with the remaining net profit shared between BBC CiNA and the RNIB Pears Centre for Specialist Learning. All is better explained at www.calendarpuzzles.co.uk where the 2017 calendar may be ordered.

* Boatman has been setting cryptic puzzles for the Guardian since 2008. Last month he published Boatman the First 50, which is what is says on the label – his first 50 Guardian puzzles, each with a story attached of how it came into being, of his thought processes in developing it and of the interaction involved between setter, solver and even, so help me, editor. It should be of particular interest to aspiring setters and may help to disabuse them of the idea that all there is to setting a puzzle for publication is to upload Crossword Compiler software, fill in a grid and think up some passable clues. The book is available from www.ypdbooks.com or from what are known as the better bookshops.

* In 2013 our very own crossword blogger Alan Connor wrote a book to mark the conventionally accepted 100th anniversary on 21 December 1913 of the publication of the first ‘modern’ crossword in the long defunct New York World. Its title was Two Girls, One on Each Knee, taken from a clue [PAT + ELLA] set by Rufus (though in his anonymous moonlighting capacity as a Daily Telegraph setter). This month Alan has produced another book, The Joy of Quiz, which with the same informative and jolly style covers the 80 years during which the quiz has become a British national institution to rival the crossword.

* Can You Solve My Problems? is a compilation by Alex Bellos, author of the wonderful Futebol: the Brazilian way of life, made up of 125 classic puzzles of the last 2,000 years from all over the world. They will keep everyone going for the full Twelve Days of Christmas and far beyond: available from https://bookshop.theguardian.com .

* I am getting a bit suspicious about the recent urge on the part of the UK security services (MI5, MI6 and GCHQ) to come out of the closet and tell, if not all, at least something. Within very living memory the Government Communications Headquarters (pre-1946 it hid itself in plain view as the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park) would never comment on what it was up to or even admit publicly that it existed. But last month Penguin published The GCHQ Puzzle Book, inviting you to test yourself against more than 140 pages of codes, puzzles and other challenges set by its code breakers. It even has a foreword by the Duchess of Cambridge, whose grandmother Valerie Middleton (née Glassborow) was one of the posh young women who worked as secretarial staff in ‘Hut 6’ at Bletchley. Proceeds from the sale of this puzzle book are to be donated to Heads Together, the mental health campaign with which she, Prince William and Prince Harry are connected.

_____

Patrick Wildgust, the Curator of the Laurence Sterne Trust, recently asked if I could help him with an even more abstruse puzzle than any in the books listed above. He looks after Shandy Hall, the house in the village of Coxwold in North Yorkshire where the author of Tristram Shandy (published between 1759 and 1767) lived and wrote in the last half of his life (d. 1768).

Torquemada, the Observer crossword setter Powys Mathers, produced a Puzzle Book published by Victor Gollancz in 1934. Its final puzzle takes the apparent form of a 100-page murder-mystery novelette entitled ‘Cain’s Jawbone’. You are told that, by accident, the pages have been printed in an entirely haphazard order but that it is logically possible for a solver by intelligent reading to sort the pages into the only possible correct order. The re-ordered story then allows the solver, in some unspecified way, to list the six murderers involved, together with their victims. The then generous prize of £15 was offered for the first two correct entries but no record seems to exist anywhere of the solution to this puzzle.

Two more recent books have used the same device, known as ‘a book in a box’, ie one where the pages are loose and in no particular order. One is Composition No 1 (1962) by the French experimental novelist Marc Saporta, who died in 2009, aged 86; the other is The Unfortunates (1969) by the English polymath B.S. Johnson, who committed suicide in 1973, aged 40. Patrick is working on connections between the three novels and the Torquemada puzzle and would be greatly assisted by discovering the solution the ‘Cain’s Jawbone’ puzzle. Any ideas?

_____

Work is under way to get the monthly Genius puzzle added to the system that handles the rest of the crossword puzzles. But it may take some time yet to get there and, meanwhile, the puzzle still has to be uploaded manually by the central production team. However, this uploading process seems to have been less accident-prone in the last couple of months and my fingers remain crossed.

September’s Genius No 159 by Jack attracted 25 entries on the first day and 224 by the deadline. PSC, a regular faithful from Australia, was first in at 05:28 on 1 September but the next four were, I think, newcomers at the top of the entry board: MLN @btinternet (07:17), OMP @O (09:24), wetmtz (10:39) and TGOxford (11:03). October’s puzzle, No 160 by Puck, had two old hands in first and second place (m1f at 03:59 and PSC from Australia at 04:16), followed by a considerable gap before the next entry, of which there were 24 by the end of the first day and 268 by the deadline. The current Genius No 161 is the second to be set by Soup. In his true colours as Hamish Symington, Soup has just taken over from Tom Johnson as editor of the monthly crossword subscription magazine 1 Across. This closes another Guardian crossword circle, for the magazine was founded by Araucaria in 1984 and edited by him until 1994. Tom Johnson, known to us as Maskarade, edited the magazine from 2000 until this year. And Hamish Symington designed and installed Araucaria’s personal crossword website, from which he took orders for bespoke cryptic puzzles. Not surprisingly, there was heavy demand for personalised Araucaria puzzles, the fees for which he donated to charity.

_____

If you have any technical problems with our crossword service, please email userhelp@theguardian.com. If you have any comments or queries about the crosswords, please email crossword.editor@theguardian.com. For Observer crosswords please email crossword.editor@observer.co.uk.