Amazing

AFTER SEVERAL YEARS ON A ZIGZAG CAREER PATH, MAZE-MAKER CHRISTOPHER BERG HAS FINALLY FIGURED OUT HOW TO MAKE A LIVING.

Navigating your way to the top of this Baker Library maze will probably take you more time than it would to climb from the basement reserves corridor to the Tower Room. It took two days for creator Christopher Berg to turn the campus landmark into a maze he describes as being of "medium" difficulty. It's harder than it first appears. See for yourself: Start at the main entrance (S) and find your way to the top of the tower (E); the answer key is on page 97.

Berg designs products such as cards and posters that incorporate mazes into their design. (More of Berg's work can be seen on his Web site, www.amazeingart.com. ) He also designs advertising campaigns that include mazes for clients such as Hertz and Ben & Jerry's. A maze is a leftbrained puzzle full of false passages and dead-ends," says Berg. "They're interesting and captivating, from an advertiser's point of view." And, he claims, they hold a consumer's attention longer than other visuals.

Berg, who produced a book of mazes three years ago, has been making sketches since the sixth grade. But it was an experience as an undergraduate that drew him toward mazes. A fascination with ancient architecture, combined with what Dartmouth classics department chairman Jerry Rutter describes as an "enthusiastic and persuasive" personality, landed Berg in Greece as part of the department's foreign study program. Although Berg, a physics major, lacked the prerequisite courses and hadn't applied within the deadline, he talked his way into the foreign study program.

"When he decides he wants to do something, he does it,"

says Rutter, who was the faculty leader on Bergs trip. "He's a quixotic, impish character...Tolkienian." If Berg is akin to a character out of an epic, his trip to Greece looms large in shaping his destiny. "For the first time I saw the Parthenon," he says. "I was inspired to draw a maze of it, and that was the beginning of my drawing." A career was born, but not without a few detours along the way. Berg sidelined mazes after graduation as he pursued his love of astronomy by working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics' Multiple Mirror Telescope, one of the worlds largest, near Tucson, Arizona. In Berg's next job, as a management consultant, a co-worker suggested that he include a maze in one of the promotional calendars they were designing for a client. That led to a book idea.

By 2001 Berg was promoting AmazemgArt: Wonders of the Ancient World (HarperCollins), which opens with an introduction by Rutter. The book features mazes of architectural structures accompanied by Bergs essays about their history, significance and construction. "It was designed to be an interactive and novel way of bringing these stories to people," he says.

Media attention for the book encouraged Berg to focus his attention on what he'd started as a hobby at Dartmouth. Around the next corner: an effort to develop a daily maze for newspaper syndication and a second book, focusing on medieval architecture.

The maze-maker says the key to success is a passion for the top- ics you work with: "Nothing comes across on the page and inspires people unless you're writing about something you love."

Stumped by the stacks? Had enough of weaving around Baker Library without finding your way to the tower? Rest easy: Here's the solution to the Baker maze, created by professional maze-maker Christopher Berg '89, that appears on