Bit shorter blog than usual because of my father-in-laws funeral last week and also because of the non arrival of a couple of books that should have been with me quite a while ago. I found I had three of the four “Mazes For Fun“ titles published under the Piccolo imprint so I bought number 4 plus the PAN ‘Mazes Book 2’ to go with number 1 all by Vladimir Koziakin. These are the two covers I wanted to scan and would normally wait but have decided to go ahead without them this time. Apart from possibly being Russian I can’t find much about Koziakin, does anyone know any more? He was a prolific producer of mazes with themed titles such as ‘The Hardy Boys Mazes’, “Flash Gordon Mazes’, ‘Greatest Car Mazes’ and ‘Monster Movie Mazes’ but these were not published by PAN.
A sample page from ‘Mazes for Fun 3’
……… and just when I thought I’d completed my Cartland challenge I find I’ve mislaid one of the titles! I thought there were 133 with the pictorial covers but I have now scaled down to 129 as 4 of the last few turned out to be film tie-ins so have photos on a pink background. Be warned, these will appear later!
Hello again, tikitnet. I wanted to share a project with you I’ve been working on for some time. My goal has been to reproduce my Koziakin “Mazes” books in a scalable digital format. I’ve finished the first one here:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lErupXuD9-6rp7eS7OVaL-ASSbGJRfPs&fbclid=IwAR3qrwJjErofcXknNRtOzKmqyXFJmNz_BDi_tk6VTP-q8Kff0NZMEFhsY2w
I’ve also been trying to find copyright holder information on the “Mazes” series (this being the books Mazes 1-7 published ’71-’77) but no luck so far. The U.S. Copyright office does provide a search site, but only for works from ’78 onward. In any case until someone complains I’ll leave this PDF up.
About the processing: after scanning the pages in I clean them up as best as I can, then use “Super Vectorizer 2” to convert them to SVG. After that I use the Linux utility rsvg-convert to produce PDFs, then combine all into a single PDF.
Hi Bert, Great to hear from you again, That looks like at lot of work. I’ll certainly print off a few and give them a go. No sure about copyright but I think if you keep your head down hopefully nobody will say anything. Keep up the good work, Tim PS I’d give work a plug but I do know PAN read my pages and more so at the moment as they are mainly working from home. Cheers, Tim
I’ve been a fan of Koziakin’s “Mazes” series of books since I was a kid in the 1970s. These are the books titled like “Mazes 2” and they were a bit more complex than the “Mazes For Fun” series.
Information on Koziakin is hard to come by, but a few months ago I bought a 1973 jigsaw puzzle maze by Koziakin which had some information about him on the back of the box.
Koziakin is of Russian descent, born in Yugoslavia during WWII. His family immigrated to the USA from Germany in 1947, to the east side of NYC. In the late 60’s he worked as a Graphic Artist for NBC on The Tonight Show and The Today Show. He began publishing his maze books in April 1971.
As it turns out he also produced maze greeting cards and a 6-foot “hanging maze” banner. The “hanging maze” along with the maze jigsaw were manufactured by Gameophiles Unlimited which seems to have been a small specialty gaming manufacturer located in NYC.
Aside from that, I have reason to believe Koziakin is still alive and resides in northeast New York state. But that’s all I can tell you.
Hi Bert, Many thanks for the update on Vladimir. I’ll certainly use it, with acknowledgement, in a future blog. I did find someone of the same name living at Redkill RD, Fleischmanns, NY 12430 but I also found a death record but as my wife’s subscription to Ancestry is only for the UK I couldn’t check it the States. I’ll keep hunting and let you know. Thanks, Tim