Happy 100th birthday to the crossword puzzle!

By Merl Reagle, Published: November 27 | Updated: Saturday, November 30, 6:00 AM

On a snowy evening in the early 1900s, a newspaper editor at the New York World was hunched over his desk trying to think of something special for the Christmas issue.

Remembering the small word squares he’d solved as a young Brit in Liverpool, he drew a diamond-shaped grid with numbered squares and numbered clues. It contained 32 words, and his simple instruction read: “Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.

The puzzle appeared Dec. 21, 1913, and what 42-year-old Arthur Wynne had created was the first crossword puzzle.

It was an instant success. Mail poured in. Readers didn’t mind that the first puzzle contained some very unusual words, such as NEIF, TANE, NEVA and NARD. Or that the word DOVE appeared twice, once clued as “a bird” and once as “a pigeon.” Or that the most unusual word was DOH, defined as “the fibre of the gomuti palm,” a clue that, if it appeared today, would elicit much the same reaction from solvers as it would from Homer Simpson.

Seeing the crossword’s popularity, Wynne pushed for the newspaper to copyright it, but his bosses, who included two of Joseph Pulitzer’s sons, considered the crossword a passing trifle. New York Times editorials labeled them a waste of time.

After just a few years, Wynne’s interest waned. He still made crosswords, but he also accepted reader submissions, becoming the country’s first crossword editor as well. By 1921, after eight years as captain of the crossword, Wynne handed the wheel to someone else.

That someone was a Smith grad named Margaret Petherbridge, a World secretary who had hopes of being a journalist. Like almost everyone on the staff, she was utterly uninterested in the crossword and simply picked the ones that had interesting shapes. She never tried solving one.

However, the paper’s most popular columnist, Franklin P. Adams, was an avid fan and began leaving his solved puzzles on Petherbridge’s desk, with the mistakes highlighted. Because the grids were a pain to create, the paper’s typesetters did their best to kill the crossword, running the clues in ever-decreasing tiny type and omitting some altogether.

After a year, Petherbridge had been shamed enough. She decided to try to solve a puzzle — and couldn’t. Rather than feel Adams’s glare, she set about organizing the puzzles in her files. Within months she had devised rules for crossword creators — amazingly, a list still followed today. She simplified the numbering system (Wynne had always numbered the ending square of each word as well as the starting square), stressed the use of common English words (obscure foreign terms had crept in), limited the black squares to one-sixth of the grid and, in essence, standardized the crossword puzzle.

From then on, puzzles that had a high degree of craftsmanship were first to be chosen. The crossword finally looked like a feature that was here to stay.

Then, in 1924, two Columbia grads decided they wanted to get into publishing. Crossword puzzles were more popular than ever, yet there had never been a collection in book form. So they enlisted Petherbridge and two colleagues to compile one: “The Cross Word Puzzle Book.” It sold 400,000 copies in only a few months.

Two more books followed, selling 2 million copies in two years. The two young publishers were Dick Simon and Max Schuster, and the first crossword book launched their careers.

And Petherbridge’s career. With the books, crosswords became a national phenomenon. Petherbridge married in 1926, becoming Margaret P. Farrar, and under that name she would go on to edit the Simon & Schuster crossword series for 60 years.

She called it her “inadvertent profession.” When she started in the 1920s she never expected such a seemingly genteel activity to be so controversial. The crossword craze killed mah-jong virtually overnight. (Mah-jong dealers put this note in the New Yorker: “Roses are red, violets are blue, we’d like to cut your throats for you.”)

There was a crossword-related news story in the New York papers almost every week: A Baptist preacher constructed a crossword for a sermon. A man refused to leave a restaurant until he finished a crossword and had to be escorted out by police. A Cleveland woman was granted a divorce because her husband was obsessed with crosswords. A Budapest waiter explained in a crossword why he was committing suicide; police were unable to solve it.

The Broadway show “Puzzles of 1925” had a skit in which crossword fans were depicted as patients in a sanitarium. Commuter trains started putting dictionaries in every car. The Los Angeles Public Library had to enforce a limit on how long you could use the dictionary.

England’s Queen Mary became a crossword fan. The Chicago Department of Health declared that crossword solving was beneficial to health and happiness. And thesaurus author Peter Roget was declared “the patron saint of cross-worders.”

All the while, the Times called crossword solving “a temporary madness,” serving “no useful purpose whatsoever,” and an “epidemic” that would soon be over.

In 1942 the Times finally gave in and hired Margaret P. Farrar as its first crossword editor.

So whatever happened to Arthur Wynne?

As readers of The Washington Post may know, I make the crossword for this magazine every Sunday. I live in Tampa, but in this age of instant everything, I just attach the puzzle in an e-mail and click “send.”

Such technology has made my puzzling life much less puzzling. And it was while surfing the Web in the 1990s that I found Wynne’s grainy Associated Press obit from the Jan. 17, 1945, Toronto Daily Star. It was one paragraph:

“Clearwater, Fla. (AP) — Arthur Wynn, credited with inventing the crossword puzzle, died Sunday. ... Wynn was born in Liverpool, England, and came to the U.S. 50 years ago to enter the newspaper business.”

First, I was stunned that the man who had invented a feature that was in nearly every newspaper in the world, even in 1945, was given such short shrift. Second, that they spelled his name wrong. And third, that he died in Clearwater. There I was, a lifelong puzzle guy in Tampa, reading that the man who invented the crossword puzzle had died 25 miles from where I was sitting.

Or, standing, since I had bolted out of the chair. I asked an editor friend at the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) to check its archives for articles. There were precious few, with nothing new.

I did know what most of us in the crossword world knew. Excellent books have been written about the crossword’s early days: “The Compleat Cruciverbalist,” “Creative Cruciverbalists” and “What’s Gnu?”

I knew that when Wynne was a boy he loved word games and the violin. He wanted to be a newspaperman, but his father, a newspaperman himself, forbade it. At 19, Arthur packed one bag and his violin, and with $30 in his pocket sailed to the United States. (Strangely, this mirrors my own life: At 20 I was a puzzle fan, played the organ and piano, and worked as a newspaper copy editor.)

Wynne found a newspaper job in Pittsburgh and played the violin in orchestras. Then he got the job at the World. He moved to Cedar Grove, N.J., and commuted every day. After inventing the crossword he became a frequent customer at New York’s famous Palm restaurant, where a wall caricature of him remains to this day. He worked for the Hearst papers in the 1930s. In 1941 he moved to Clearwater for health reasons and died four years later.

And that became the puzzle with no answer: Where was he buried? Somewhere in Tampa Bay? If so, is there a gravestone? Or was he transported to a family plot in Liverpool? Fifteen years later I still had no answer.

The break came in July this year. While surfing the Web, my wife, Marie, found the hometown obit of Wynne’s oldest daughter, Janet. It mentioned that there was another daughter living in Clearwater. Wynne had married a third time to a much younger woman and had fathered a child at 62. That daughter’s name was Catherine Wynne — they called her Kay — and she was 11 when her father died.

Her married name was Kay Wynne Cutler. She had turned 80 in April and was living in Clearwater. It took Marie only minutes to find her number and call. A bright-sounding woman answered. The conversation lasted 15 minutes. We tried not to show that we were giddy as kids in an ice cream parlor. We agreed to meet.

Kay walks with a cane but is sharp. She laughs easily. She brought articles about her father. As far as she knows she is the only one in the family who is a crossword fan.

She had the answer to my “grave” question. There was no burial site because there was no burial. Her father had been cremated. Kay says she was too young to know, but she thinks his ashes were scattered in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, she was a student at Anona Elementary, a happy accident for the daughter of a puzzle creator — the name of the school is a palindrome.

Kay said her father used to say that he never made a penny off the crossword puzzle. In this, the 100th anniversary of his invention, I hope he can settle for recognition.

Merl Reagle is a professional puzzle author. 

Party Down: 100 Years of the Crossword Puzzle

A conversation with Deb Amlen, New York Times crossword puzzler extraordinaire.

Rebecca J. Rosen / Dec 20 2013, 7:32 AM ET

This weekend marks the 100th birthday of the crossword puzzle. On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne published a little diamond-shaped grid, along with 30-odd clues, in the New York World. The puzzle didn't immediately catch on, but just over a decade later, it exploded.

In 1924, the publishing house Simon & Schuster, agreed to a small (3,600-copy) run of a crossword puzzle book, prompted by founder Richard L. Simon's aunt, who wanted to give such a book to a friend. It became "a runaway bestseller." According to Smithsonian Magazine,

In no time the publisher had to put the book back on press; through repeated printings, it sold more than 100,000 copies. Soon a second collection followed, and then a third and a fourth. In 1924 and 1925 the crossword books were among the top 10 nonfiction bestsellers for the year, besting, among others, The Autobiography of Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan.

In the time since, crossword puzzles have become a beloved morning tradition in many homes. Today's puzzles still fundamentally look a lot like that first puzzle by Wynne, but many aspects of puzzling have changed: how they are constructed, the sorts of clues they contain, and even how (some) puzzlers go about solving them. I spoke with Deb Amlen, writer of Wordplay, the official crossword blog of The New York Times, and humor columnist for Yahoo! Tech, about how our digital age is shaping crossword puzzles. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation (which was conducted in Google Docs) follows.

So perhaps we can just begin with a little bit of the basics. How do crossword puzzles get put together today? Are writers using software? Graph paper? What does the process look like?

Well, everyone is different, of course, but I would say that the vast majority of constructors use some sort of software to at least frame their crossword puzzle. By framing, I mean that although the idea for the theme or some of the really lively entries might be a result of their own creativity, the software gives them a cleaner place to store their ideas and build on them. And I would say that many constructors also fill their puzzles with words and phrases "by hand," even though they are using this software. Many of the software programs have an "autofill" feature where the computer puts in words just because they fit, but that’s frowned upon in the community. The better puzzles have lively entries that constructors save in word lists so that the puzzles are more entertaining.

I created my first crossword puzzles on graph paper, and when I finally purchased the software in 2004, I really did see the advantage of having a place to store my word lists, and not have to deal with the intense amount of erasure and bloodshed that building a puzzle involves.

So, just to make sure I have this straight, the software gives you a grid, and then you begin by filling in words to make everything fit. Once the solution is there, you write the clues?

This is a very simplified breakdown of how to build a puzzle, which not everyone follows.

1. First, you need to decide if you are making a themed or nonthemed puzzle. For the sake of this discussion, let’s say it has a theme. The theme can be anything, but in an early week puzzle, it usually is just a set of entries that all have something in common, something that makes them hang together. This is the part that really takes a lot of time if you’re a good constructor, because it’s a creative endeavor that also has quite a few constraints on it: You need to come up with something entertaining, that hasn’t been done before, that makes sense to/is likely to be familiar to a majority of solvers, and it also has to fit into the grid using certain letter counts, because a majority of puzzles use what’s called rotational symmetry. That’s a complex phrase that simply means that it’s symmetrical on a diagonal, and if you turn the grid upside down, it will look exactly the same. Those constraints have been in place for a very long time.

"I think that having software available for constructing has made it possible for people to be more prolific, although whether that’s a good thing is left for better minds than mine to determine."

2. Once you are happy with your theme, it’s time to build the grid. When you open a new file in one of these software programs, you can choose from a selected list of already built grids (e.g., they already have a pattern of black squares in them) OR, and this is the way professionals do it, you select a blank grid that is the size you want, and start to place your theme entries in the grid, placing the black squares at the same time. The challenge here is to place them so they don’t violate the constraints that need to be followed, but at the same time, giving the constructor a good chance of being able to fill around the theme with sparkling, lively entries. As you can see, it’s quite a challenge and an artform, but we’re not done yet.

3. Now it’s time to fill. There are some things that can’t be avoided when filling a crossword puzzle, but we generally try to avoid using too many abbreviations (and when we do, they should be ones that are instantly familiar to a majority of people, like NAACP or CGI) and too many "partials," which are parts of phrases like IN THE, which might be the answer to a clue like "The farmer ____ dell."

Will Shortz, who has been the editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993, is known for having brought the puzzle into the "modern age" by allowing more pop culture and lively entries into a puzzle that had been considered an activity in intellectual snobbery up to that point. I agree. I think the puzzle should be a form of entertainment. That’s why it’s located where it is in the printed paper.

4. Cluing time! This can either be fun or drudgery, depending on who you ask. I love writing a good, misdirected clue, and solvers who have some experience love that feeling of having to get into the brain of the constructor and editor.

Early in the week, the clues are pretty straightforward, and increase in difficulty as the week progresses. The editor is responsible for making sure that the clues fit the day of the week, are clear and play fair with the solvers, and are generally well-written. There are tricks that the constructor uses to let the solver know that something else might be going on rather than it being a straightforward clue. For example, if you see a question mark at the end of a clue, that indicates that some wordplay is involved.

In what ways has software changed that process? Do you see any differences in puzzles that are built with software versus ones done by hand?

I think that having software available for constructing has made it possible for people to be more prolific, although whether that’s a good thing is left for better minds than mine to determine. Personally, I don’t like puzzles that rely on the pre-programmed words and phrases and seem to be just churned out, although I know it exists. You can hit a button that says “autofill,” and if the grid is fillable, it fills.

"If you have to Google something to help you complete the puzzle and you learn something from having done it, that’s a good thing."

But that doesn’t make it a good puzzle. And it’s very obvious when someone has done that. You can have words in there that are not only not commonly used or are of interest to the average solver, but they might not even make sense. I would much rather see constructors who take the time to create or “handfill” a puzzle with current words and phrases that are of interest to people today. Or at least, if they’re not current or within my own knowledge base, they are “gettable” through the crossings, and make me feel interested in learning about them. I always love learning new words, but there has to be a valid reason for it being in the puzzle.

Getting away from the question of crossword construction, do you think technology—particularly the web—is changing the process of solving puzzles for people?

Oh, yes. While there are many solvers who continue to solve in the print paper and in books and magazines like Games Magazine, the online solving community has exploded. People are solving on the web, on their tablets, on their phones … anywhere and anyway they can get a fix. And I think that some people, who are called speed solvers and who like to time themselves to see how fast they can solve, like solving on a computer, because most of them can type faster than they can write.

I see so many sites where you can look up clues if you are stumped. I was just wondering the other day if calls to the Times’s clues hotline had fallen off a cliff.

Yes, Googling a clue has gotten very popular, although there are a significant number of solvers who consider that “cheating.” I, personally, don’t think it’s cheating unless you’re competing in a tournament. As Will Shortz says, it’s your puzzle; you can solve it any way you want. And I think that if you have to Google something to help you complete the puzzle and you learn something from having done it, that’s a good thing.

What is the impact of blogs like Wordplay on puzzlers? Are puzzle-lovers connecting to each other more? Is there more of a community?

I’m so glad you asked that. Yes, there’s a huge online community, and Wordplay is just part of it. Some people feel that doing a crossword puzzle is a solitary activity, and while it can be, I believe it has the potential for tremendous social interaction.

"She confessed that solving the puzzle was the last lucid conversation she had with him before he died. I cried when I read that."

Just the other day, in fact, I was watching a television show where a woman wanted to know how to look more available to men when she was out, and the suggestion was that she bring the crossword puzzle with her and strike up a conversation with someone by asking them for help with a clue.  Puzzles bring people together. I remember spending time looking over my father’s shoulder when he did the Times crossword, and was so pleased when I could finally help him solve some of the clues.

The most moving connection I can recall about how puzzles bring people together is this: I wrote the crossword puzzle for BUST Magazine from 2005 and until this year, and someone once wrote and told me that she took the puzzle with her to do on the plane when she went to see her dad on his death bed. They had always gotten a kick out of doing the BUST puzzle together, because it was much different than what you would see in a New York Times crossword. She confessed that solving the puzzle was the last lucid conversation she had with him before he died. I cried when I read that.

Prior to Wordplay, The New York Times had a very busy online forum where people could talk about the puzzles, and in addition to the Wordplay blog, we also have popular blogs like Diary of a Crossword Fiend, written by Amy Reynaldo and Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword Puzzle, written by Michael Sharp. All are places where people get to talk about the day’s puzzle.

What I love about writing Wordplay is watching friendships evolve. The commenters on Wordplay seem particularly tight. After a natural disaster, one of my regular readers lost a good number of her possessions, and people wrote asking me how to help her. On a crossword blog in a newspaper. That just blows me away and makes me feel very good about being a part of it.

Crossword Puzzle Blues

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In Fashion

The crossword became so popular, that commuter rail lines had dictionaries in every car. There was a Broadway show called “Puzzles of 1925″. And the roaring 20s wild style lead to inventive dresses with the puzzle as their fabric.

Rare French Fashion Plate

One Hundred Down

A proposal for giant crosswords to be erected at train stations to entertain
waiting passengers in 1925, as the craze swept the U.S.

by Tom Johnson | November 14, 2013

Crosswords bewitch, mislead, infuriate. They have a vocabulary all of their own; they play with language; they entertain, teach, mystify and tantalize. Once bitten by the crossword bug, a solver finds it difficult to avoid looking at life, words, context and meaning in a new and cryptic way.

A hundred years ago, on 21st December 1913, Arthur Wynne presented what is recognized as the first true crossword to the unsuspecting readership of the New York World. He continued to provide puzzles for the next 10 years without anyone following suit. Then, in 1923 two Harvard graduates, Robert Simon and Lincoln Schuster, launched their "Cross Word Puzzle Book". Its first edition sold out overnight and nine reprints soon followed.

The next year, the crossword crossed the Atlantic. In November 1924, one appeared in the Sunday Express, and a few months later the Daily Telegraph became the first British newspaper to publish a daily crossword. Though originally intended as a six-week series, it became a permanent fixture. From there, crosswords multiplied. The Times was forced to give way in 1930. Adrian Bell, (father of Martin, the white-jacketed BBC reporter) compiled this crossword, his first of over 4,500 for the paper. By 1932, they had become so popular that the Spectator could acknowledge that the crossword “had ceased to be a craze and become a habit.”

My own introduction to crosswords came through my parents, who were keen solvers of the Reader’s Crossword in the Birmingham Evening Mail. They explained to their eight-year-old son what an anagram was (I recall having problems with “rare” as an anagram of “rear”). My first professional crossword was published in October 1962 but it was with the arrival of the Puzzler magazine in the autumn of 1972 that my crossword career took off. This was an opportunity to compile “bread and butter” puzzles and earn a living from my hobby. I have since compiled over 2,000 puzzles for all 510 issues. Commissioned work was not without its annoyances in the early days. The Swiss founder of the magazine demanded that none of these coffee-break puzzles should include plurals, adverbs, past participles or present participles. I soon fell foul of these rules, he claimed, when one of my definitional crosswords was rejected on the grounds that it contained the solution “quadruped,” which was, in his view, a past participle.

So what is it that made me a crossword compiler, when the 1960s were swinging and the Beatles were conquering the world? Why was I curled up in my room, fascinated by placing letters in little white squares in a crossword grid? I’ll admit it: I am and always have been a nerd. My English teachers at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, instilled in me a love of words, and studying Latin was a joy as it explained so much about our language. My career as a modern languages teacher enabled me to enjoy words and grammar professionally, before I left the chalk-face in 2002 to become a full-time professional compiler.

If I tell you that my other hobby is buses—hence three of my other pseudonyms as a crossword compiler: Anorak, Busman and Gozo—you will then have a flavor of the man. Which other compiler can claim to have written the Malta Bus Handbook? Why do I keep print copies of all my published puzzles, just in case someone wants a complete collection? Why do I possess every copy of Buses magazine since April 1961?

Despite its American origins, the crossword, and above all the cryptic crossword, has become an especially British phenomenon. It is generally agreed that the development of the English language, with so many linguistic influences—among them, Latin, Greek, Arabic, Indian, Romance and European languages—has provided an elasticity which few other languages can boast. Consequently influential compilers of the 1930s were starting to play with our language as they prepared their clues and so the British cryptic crossword gradually evolved.

Abroad, puzzles are different. American puzzles tend to be purely definitional, frequently appearing in huge panels with a few loosely thematic solutions, but compiled on a grid in which every letter is cross-checked in a solution Across and Down. In Germany many puzzles fit into a large grid (sometimes with a photo of a celebrity whose name appears as one of the solutions) without black squares. Instead, clues (concise or abbreviated) appear in the squares where the black ones should be, with arrows indicating the direction in which the solution be entered.

Three early compilers developed the British cryptic crossword. Edward Powys Mathers, who assumed the pseudonym Torquemada (the first Inquisitor General of Spain in the 15th century), was attracted to crosswords in the autumn of 1924, but quickly dismissed the rudimentary definitional style of puzzle that had traveled from the US to Britain. Instead, he dreamed up a series of 12 puzzles with clues in couplets and a pictorial diagram. When the Observer invited him to provide a puzzle—he went on to compile 670 in total—he decided on compiling on barred grids (rather than blocked grids, those with black and white squares) in which most letters were cross-checked in the solutions Across and Down. His clues were like nobody else’s. His erudition meant that his solvers were challenged to complete abstruse quotations from English literature; solutions had to be entered backwards; words were arbitrarily divided in two to suit the demands of the puzzle; he developed the story crossword (“narratives” as he called them) in which the missing words in the story were the crossword solutions; his grids were asymmetrical. Edward Elgar and Austen Chamberlain were two of his greatest admirers.

As a contemporary of Torquemada, Prebendary Alistair Ferguson Ritchie of Wells Cathedral established his credentials as a compiler for the fearsome Listener crossword series. Some of his prewar puzzles attracted no correct entries. He dwelt on the theory and practice of crosswords and paved the way for a codification and standardization of the true cryptic crossword. His dictum—“You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean”—soon became the yardstick for any good clue.

Mathers died in 1939 and was succeeded by Derrick Somerset Macnutt as the principal compiler for the Observer. Just as Torquemada was followed by Ximenes in the Inquisition, so Macnutt assumed the pseudonym Ximenes. Considered the father of the modern crossword puzzle, Ximenes maintained that individual words should interlock fairly, that grids should not contain two or three consecutive unchecked letters and that a five-letter solution with only its second and fourth letters cross-checked was unfair to solvers, especially if these two letters were vowels. Just think how many words would fit into this five-letter pattern: _ A _ E _. Symmetry became a regular constituent of a Ximenes puzzle. “Is it entirely the look of the thing?” he once asked. “I think it is, very largely,” was his answer. And so it has remained ever since.

Individual compilers in the more recent past have influenced the development of the British crossword. From July 1971, the Spectator’s Jac (John Adelmare Caesar) single-handedly presented his own challenging thematic cryptic puzzles. Jac’s innovative approach was to offer a puzzle with “unclued lights” (solutions without clues) which solvers had to work out from the intersecting clued solutions in the grid, along with the cryptic help of the title. The Spectator continues to offer puzzles true to Jac’s style. Mass (Harold Massingham) and I (as Doc) were invited to join Jac in 1981. I now edit the series, too, with Columba (Antico in the Oldie), Dumpynose, Lavatch and Mr Magoo being the other team-members. Alec Robins (Custos in the Guardian, Zander in the Listener and as half of the Everyman series in the Observer) wrote the ground-breaking Teach Yourself Crosswords in 1975 which explained the appeal of and frustration of the British cryptic. Jonathan Crowther, as Azed in the Observer, succeeded Ximenes and has continued the tradition every Sunday since 1971. John Graham, as Araucaria in the Guardian and Cinephile in the Financial Times, broke away from the strict Ximenean rules to create his personal style, pushing the boundaries of cluing in cryptic puzzles, now carried on, especially, by his protégés John Henderson (Enigmatist) and John Halpern (Paul).

How do you compile a crossword? A compiler looks at English words and language in a new way, then presents his solvers with the challenge of interpreting his intentions. Why are you “happiest” when smashing “epitaphs”? During the Olympics last year, I could not refrain from imagining “Usain Bolt” carrying out his anagrammatical “ablutions” before a race. Similarly “Clare Short” has “orchestral” connections. Who but a crossword compiler would have realised that “White Christmas” has “hi-tech” hidden inside?

Compiling is dependent on the difficulty, style and standard of each puzzle. Most newspapers have a stock of standard grids for compilers to use. Other series (the Generalist in Prospect is among these) have no standard patterns and the compiler is free to devise the grid as they wish. When compiling the Generalist, I will always have decided on an interesting, arcane, archaic or amusing word or phrase to start off with and the grid evolves as I build up interlocking and cross-checking solutions. Sometimes I may hide a message in the puzzle. I did so in the October 2013 issue to commemorate the birth of my granddaughter. I always complete the grid before starting the cluing—though it may well be that a few of the solutions (especially in a cryptic puzzle) have been included because I have already dreamt up a “good” clue for them.

Cryptic crossword vocabulary has to be learnt. Everyday words adopt a wholly new meaning in clues—a river is a “flower,” in other words, something which “flows,” or it could be a “banker” as it has “banks”; a “topless gown” would lead to the solution “own,” because the initial letter has to be discarded.

All clues must indicate exactly what the word play is; there is usually a clear definition of the solution either at the start or end of the clue, the remaining segment being the cryptic references which constitute the word play. Thus the compiler “says what he means” to enable the solver to crack the wording of the clue. But overall, the clue will paint a picture which does not need to have any relevance at all to the solution and thus “may not mean what it says.”
I generally prepare clues in rough on paper. The availability of crossword compiling software which provides extensive word lists, grid-making facilities and anagram programs has certainly simplified compiling a puzzle, but in so doing has taken away the fun, challenge and mental satisfaction of working on a puzzle for yourself. So I still rely on my library of reference books and dictionaries. I do not consciously alter my style to suit my various pseudonyms. Rather, it is my pseudonym which associates me with an individual crossword series.

Will the crossword still be going strong when its 200th birthday rolls around in 2113? The future seems bright. Twenty and more years ago compilers met only rarely. Nowadays compilers, solvers and bloggers are in daily contact. The Internet has put a human face on the crossword world and has made a compiler’s life far less solitary. While other print publications are losing readers owing to the Internet, the joy of solving puzzles on paper remains.

Ephemera Offers a Clue to Crossword Origins

By Will Shorty

Ephemera Society of America member, Will Shortz is a lucky man. As the New York Times crossword editor, and puzzlemaster for National Public Radio, he’s in the unusual position of having turned a hobby into his life’s work. He began creating crossword puzzles when he was 9 or 10 years old, selling them professionally when he was 14, and began collect antique puzzle books not long after. The rest is a seven-letter word beginning with “H” and ending with “Y”. This article originally appeared in Ephemera News, vol. 19, no. 4, Summer 2001.

More than 50 million Americans do crossword puzzles. At least one crossword appears in almost every American newspaper. For something so simple and ubiquitous, you might think it’s been around since ancient times, but in fact it’s a 20th-century American invention. The first puzzle generally accepted to be a crossword appeared in the Sunday “Fun” section of the old New York World on December 21, 1913.

“Fun” was a small, 8- to 16-page weekly color supplement of puzzles, jokes, riddles and cartoons. On the Sunday before Christmas in 1913, “Fun” editor Arthur Wynne fashioned a grid of interlocking words in the shape of a hollow diamond and dubbed the result a “Word Cross.”
The response from readers was immediate and enthusiastic, so Wynne made the “Word Cross” a regular feature. On its third week the puzzle’s compositor made a mistake, accidentally transposing the two words in the title — and the name “Cross-Word” (later a solid word) has remained ever since.

For a crossword collector like myself, Wynne’s first “Word Cross” is the Holy Grail. As far as I know, I own the only copy outside of an institution — part of an entire run of “Fun” (containing many varieties of original puzzles by Wynne) from 1911 to 1916.

At some point Wynne left the newspaper to serve in World War I. “Fun” was discontinued, but crosswords continued in the Sunday World Magazine, where they developed a following among the literary set.

In 1924 two young graduates of Columbia University’s Journalism School, Richard Simon and Max Schuster, were starting a publishing company. According to legend, Simon was having dinner with his Aunt Wixie, who requested a volume of crossword puzzles for her daughter — her daughter being a fan of the weekly challenges in the World.

Discovering that no such volume existed, they commissioned the World’s puzzle editors (a trio with the impressive names Prosper Buranelli, F. Gregory Hartswick, and Margaret Petherbridge) to edit such a book from a drawer full of unpublished manuscripts. The Cross Word Puzzle Book, released in April, was the first crossword book in the world, and the first book of any sort from the fledgling firm of Simon and Schuster. As a promotional gimmick, the book had a loop attached on the back cover with a Venus pencil inside it.

Sales took off immediately. The first printing of 3,600 copies sold out in a matter of weeks. A second printing did likewise. Then numerous printings of ever-increasing numbers followed. Two more volumes were rushed into print, and other publishers followed with their own. By the end of the year the Cross Word Puzzle Books ranked #1, #2, and #3 on the national nonfiction bestseller list, with 400,000 copies in print. Altogether, six of the top 10 volumes on the list were crosswords.

The success of the crossword books launched a nationwide craze, even more furious than the hula hoop, pet rocks and Beanie Babies.

Within a short time nearly every newspaper began publishing a daily crossword, sometimes offering thousands of dollars for solutions. Crossword dresses and jewelry sold briskly. Songs like Cross Word Mamma You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out) could be heard on the radio. The B&O Railroad installed unabridged dictionaries in its trains for the convenience of its crossword-solving passengers. On Broadway Elsie Janis starred in the revue Puzzles of 1925 in which one scene was set in a mock crossword sanitarium.

The years 1924-25 were a bonanza for the types of crossword ephemera I collect. Included are the first two crossword puzzle magazines, Fad, and the aptly titled Cross Word Puzzle Magazine.
The New York Herald Tribune hosted several crossword championships, from which programs and puzzles survive. Goodrich Tires, Battleship Coffee, Rumford Baking Powder, and other advertisers put out booklets of prize crosswords. McLoughlin Brothers published a crossword puzzle game for competitive play at parties.

Judge humor magazine devoted an entire issue, November 15, 1924, to crossword cartoons and humor. It was such a success that two more “Crossword Numbers” were published in early 1925. Raphael Tuck produced two series of colorful and funny crossword postcards. The Duncan Sisters sang Cross Word Puzzle Blues. I have both the record and the sheet music.
And, most unusual, I have two crossword quilts from 1925. One of them was an entry to a contest in the Chicago Tribune, in which the solver was supposed to submit answers to 48 crossword puzzles, one for each state in the union. All 48 of the contestant’s solutions are embroidered into the quilt, letter by letter, and the contestant’s filled-in entry form is pinned to the edge.

\Unlike other fads of the 20s, like raccoon coats and flagpole sitting, crossword puzzles had staying power. After the furor abated, some newspapers tried to drop the feature, but complaints were so numerous that the puzzles were quickly reinstated.

Meanwhile, Simon and Schuster continued publication of its crossword books at the rate of two or more volumes a year — a series that continues today with volume #220 and counting, making it the largest commercial book series of any kind ever published. I have all but 11 volumes in the series.

Other notable milestones were the founding of Dell Crossword Puzzles, in October 1931, the longest-running crossword magazine in America (I have over two-thirds of the issues); and the start of the famous New York Times crossword in its Sunday magazine on February 15, 1942.
Of special interest to me are crossword magazines published before 1970, of which I have literally thousands. I also collect crossword-related advertisements and articles (numerous), photos (not too many of these yet), and vanity license plates (just two so far).

The most unusual item in my collection is Williams Crossword pinball game, manufactured in 1959, which I keep in the basement of my house, still in perfect working order. It is always a hit with guests at parties.

The obvious question to any collector is “Why?” For me the old crosswords themselves are of historical interest only. Any crossword published before 1975 is probably too dry, bland, and out-of-date to engage solvers today. But I treasure the history. It’s valuable to me to see how crosswords developed into their modern form. Somebody needs to preserve the past before it’s lost. Also, I enjoy the historical items as artifacts, which someday I will show in a large book on the subject.

Finally, as a general matter, I appreciate how collecting crosswords leads rewardingly into so many areas of life, culture, and history, just as good crosswords themselves do.

The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader

The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader In the 1920s, a crossword puzzle craze swept the nation that drove some people over the edge: a man shot his wife when she wouldn't help him and another man killed himself leaving a suicide note in the form of a crossword puzzle. Here's the story of how crossword puzzles came to be and why it took over twenty years for The New York Times to convince itself to carry the puzzles. Origin Arthur Wynne was a writer for the game page of the New York World at the turn of the 19th century. One winter afternoon in 1913, while trying to think up new types of games for the newspaper's special Christmas edition, he came up with a way to adapt the "word squares" his grandfather had taught him when he was a boy. In a word square, all of the words in the square have to read the same horizontally and vertically, like the example below. But in the new puzzle Wynne came up with, the "across" words were different from the "down" words. It was more challenging, since there were more words to work on. Wynne's puzzle, which he called a "Word-Cross," debuted on Sunday December 21 as planned. And it was well-received. So many people wrote in to praise the puzzle that he put one in the paper the following Sunday and again on the third Sunday. (See if you can solve the World's First Crossword Puzzle) Reversal of Fortune Four weeks after the puzzle first appeared, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently transposed the words in the title to read "Cross-Word." For some reason, the name stuck - and so did the puzzle. When the World tried to drop it a few months later, readers were so hostile that the paper reversed itself and decided to make it a permanent feature of the puzzle page instead. Though the puzzles were popular with readers, they were decidedly unpopular with editors. Crosswords were difficult to print and were plagued with typographical and other errors. In fact, no other newspaper wanted any part of them. So for the next 10 years, if you wanted to work on a crossword puzzle, you had to buy the World. Enter Simon and Schuster According to legend, in 1924 a young Columbia University graduate named Richard L. Simon went to dinner at his Aunt Wixie's house. A World subscriber and a cross-word devotee, she asked where she could buy a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter. Simon, who was trying to break into the publishing business with college chum M. Lincoln Schuster, told her there were no such books … and then hit on the idea of publishing one himself. M. Lincoln Schuster (R) and Ricahrd L. Simon (L). Photo: Simon & Schuster  The next day, he and Schuster went to the World's offices and made a deal with the paper's crossword puzzle editors. They would pick the newspaper's best crossword puzzles and pay $25 apiece for the rights to publish them in a book. The pair then used all their money to print The Cross Word Puzzle Book. Hot off the Presses It was literally an overnight success. The World's crossword puzzlers flocked to stores to get copies, and by the end of the year more than 300,000 crossword books had been sold. The book turned Simon & Schuster into a major publisher. (Today it's the largest U.S. publishing house and the second-largest publisher on earth). It also started a major craze. Crossword puzzles became a way of life in the 1920s. Newspaper started adding them to increase circulation. They inspired a Broadway hit called Games of 1925 and a hit song called "Crossword Mama, You Puzzle Me." Sales of dictionaries soared, and foot traffic in libraries increased dramatically. Clothes made with black-and-white checked fabric were the rage. The B&O Railroad put dictionaries on all of its mainline trains for crossword-crazy commuters. Crossword Casualties Some folks were driven over the edge by the craze. In 1924, a Chicago woman sued her husband for divorce, claiming "he was so engrossed in solving crosswords that he didn't have time to work." The judge ordered the man to "limit himself to 3 puzzles a day and devote the rest of his time to domestic duties." In 1925, a New York Telephone Co. employee shot his wife when she wouldn't help with a crossword puzzle. And in 1926, a Budapest man committed suicide, leaving an explanation in the form of a crossword puzzle. (No one could solve it.) Eventually, the craze died down. It took The New York Times to revive it. Today, The New York Times crossword puzzle is considered the puzzle of choice for hardcore addicts, but that hasn't always been true. Believe it or not, the Times resisted crosswords for more than two decades. Here's the story of how the newspaper changed its mind. Hard Times By the late 1930s, the crossword puzzle boom that started in 1924 had begun to fizzle - largely because the crossword puzzles in most newspapers had become predictable. They constantly repeat boring clues like "Headgear" (hat), "Writing instrument" (pen) and "Woody plant" (tree). But readers of The New York Times never got bored with their crossword puzzle … because the Times didn't have one. Then, as now, the Times considered itself America's "newspaper of record" and the guardian of journalistic standards. It scoffed at crossword puzzles as "a primitive form of mental exercise" in a1924 editorial, and refused to print them. Eighteen years later, it was one of the last puzzle holdouts among America's major newspapers. All this and World War II Still, the Times had crossword puzzle fans on its staff. Publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger is said to have loved crosswords almost as much as he hated having to buy copies of the rival New York Herald Tribune in order to get them. And as America teetered on the brink of war in the early 1940s, the mood at the paper began to change. Less than two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Lester Markel, the Times' Sunday editor, dashed off a memo to his superiors suggesting that they consider adding a puzzle to the Sunday paper. The pressures and demands of the war played heavily on his mind. "We ought to proceed with the puzzle," he wrote, "especially in view of the fact that it is possible that there will now be bleak blackout hours - or if not that, then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind of other … We ought not to try to do anything essentially different from what is now being done - except to do it better." Markel had met with Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, senior crossword puzzle editor at Simon & Schuster, and he attached a memo from her: The Herald Tribune runs the best puzzle page in existence so far, but they have gotten into a bit of a rut. Their big puzzle never ventures even one imaginative definition, and lacks the quality that I believe can be achieved and maintained. We could, I dare to predict, get the edge on them. I don't think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword … Getting Started The argument worked. The Times hired Farrar away from Simon & Schuster and made her its crossword editor, a position she held until she retired in 1969. The first puzzle appeared on February 15, 1942, in the Sunday magazine section. (Weekday puzzles weren't added until September 1950.) "The puzzle," writes Times reporter Richard Shepard, "was an instant success." Under Margaret Farrar's direction, the crossword "constructors" (freelance puzzle makers) developed a clever and elaborate style. Instead of giving clues like "Stinging insect" (bee) and "Bird's home" (nest), they phrased them as "Nectar inspector" and "Nutcracker's suite." The Times' clever, whimsical style almost single-handedly ushered in a crossword renaissance, as newspapers all over the U.S. followed its lead. Today, more than 90 percent of newspapers around the world have crossword puzzles, and, according to a study by the U.S. Newspaper Advertising Bureau, 26 percent of people who read newspapers regularly attempt to solve them. Setting the Pace The New York Times crossword puzzle sets the standard that other puzzles follow. Here are just some of the informal (but strictly followed) "rules" that were established by the Times' example: There can be no unkeyed letters - letters that appear in only one word of the puzzle. Every single letter of the puzzle must be part of both a horizontal and a vertical word. The black and white pattern must be "diagonally symmetrical." The black squares should not take up more than one-sixth of the total design. The puzzle shouldn't have "dirty double-crossers" - that is, obscure words should not intersect one another. Puzzling Facts The Times estimates that it takes the average puzzler half an hour to solve the 15-square-by-15-square daily puzzle, and two hours to solve the much larger Sunday puzzle. The Times daily puzzles are designed to get progressively harder from Monday through Saturday. The Saturday puzzle is nearly impossible for anyone but experts to solve. The Sunday puzzle is even worse. The paper figures that the weekend puzzles should be the hardest, because that's when people have the most time to work on them. Constructing the crossword puzzles take a lot more time than solving them. "It takes me a day to make a Times Sunday puzzle," says Maura B. Jacobson, one of the Times' constructors. "I spend at least 10 or 12 hours making definitions. My research takes a day, then a day to get the words into the diagram to make them cross. But the hardest is making the definitions." Making a puzzle that lives up to The New York Times standards isn't easy - Eugene Maleska, the paper's crossword editor in 1992, estimates that there aren't more than 600 people in the entire country skilled enough to do it. And the puzzles have to be thoroughly edited before the go to press. "I and all editors change about a third of the definitions," Maleska told reporters in 1992. "I have a notebook filled with definitions so I don't repeat them." The New York Times goes to great length not to offend anyone with its puzzles. Words as innocuous as "bra" are forbidden, as are the names of illegal drugs. Words such as "ale" and "rum" are considered to be at the extreme limit of good taste - they are permitted but aren't used often.

The article above is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!