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I linked a paper by James Schmerl in a recent question which cites Karl Scherer, A Puzzling Journey to the Reptiles and Related Animals, Privately Published, 1987.

I have had difficulty finding any mention of this document except for a lone citation on the Wikipedia page Rep-tile. I don't know if it is a paper or a book.

Karl Scherer is mentioned many times on various webpages about rep-tiles and this page credits him with coining the term "irreptile". I managed to find karlscherer.com on the Wayback Machine but I can't find any mention of what I was searching for.

Does anyone know anything about this document, or have a digital copy?

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    $\begingroup$ If you (or any other reader) can get hold of a copy, scanning it and making it available online would be a huge service to the community. Literature like this, published through less-mainstream channels, is especially at risk of getting lost in the long term. $\endgroup$
    – Peter LeFanu Lumsdaine
    Commented May 5 at 13:27
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    $\begingroup$ @PeterLeFanuLumsdaine I have been gifted a pdf of a photocopy of the book. How do you recommend making it available online? $\endgroup$
    – Kepler's Triangle
    Commented May 13 at 21:13

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Here is the web page for the book, with a table of contents, and a description:

Written as a fiction, this book is about a type of geometrical puzzles called 'irregular reptiles' or 'irreptiles'. Whereas reptiles (or rep-tiles) are two-dimensional shapes which can be dissected into smaller shapes which are similar to the original shape and all of the same size, this book is more concerned with the much wider class of 'irregular' reptiles or 'irreptiles'. Here the condition is relaxed that all parts of the dissection have to be of same size. This leads to tessellations of unexpected beauty, of puzzles never seen before and to many interesting new problems.
The 'Puzzling Journey...' comprises more than 100 new problems (collected, stated and solved by me over the time of more than twenty years). None of these problems have been published before. The book is heavily illustrated by more than 350 drawings (!) and can be seen as a compendium on this subject. It covers all aspects of irreptiles, opens up dozens of new areas in geometry and properties of shapes to be investigated (e.g. 'teratiles'), and states many unsolved questions. It is an ideal book for puzzlists. All problems can be solved with pencil and paper, or by cutting out shapes in plywood or cardboard.

Karl Scherer's (and Martin Gardner's) work on tiling has been discussed previously on MO.

Only one library seems to have Scherer's book.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you so much. How did you find the web page? I didn't get any of these details when I googled it. $\endgroup$
    – Kepler's Triangle
    Commented May 4 at 21:12
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    $\begingroup$ I found an old pointer to this site, which has been discontinued so Google no longer indexes it. $\endgroup$
    – Carlo Beenakker
    Commented May 5 at 6:07

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