The Crossword Century

by Alan Connor

  It includes one answer twice (DOVE), and the clue for MIRED is—what’s a polite word here?—misleading, but there it is: a new thing in the world. The most important thing about the first puzzle is that big “FUN” across the second row. It might have been there because it was the name of the Sunday supplement, but it also served as a manifesto for crosswording. Individual puzzles may or may not be edifying, challenging, or distracting, but they must always be fun. After all, nobody is forcing solvers to look at them.

  The second most important thing is the squares. The crossword’s antecedent, the double acrostic (again, see below), tended to offer only the clues: The solver put the answers together in his or her head, or found somewhere to write the letters. But twentieth-century printing technology made it easier to offer a grid depiction of the problem that was both clearer and more enticing, the little boxes staring up from the newsprint, begging to be filled.

  The prewar period was one of linguistic innovation and reinvention. We will look at spoonerisms below. This was also a world that saw innovations with language: entirely new creations, such as the artificial languages Esperanto and Ido, and different means of conveying words, such as developments in stenography. And then there was the crossword, which broke up language into abstract units for reassembly: Rising newspaper sales and the age of mechanical reproduction helped to make the puzzle the most widely disseminated way of messing around with words. Even with the reader-compiled puzzles that occasionally took the place of Wynne’s in The World, though, it remained only a weekly phenomenon, and for the first ten years of its life it existed exclusively as an American phenomenon—indeed, it existed solely within the pages of that one newspaper. The puzzle had its devotees, but nobody spotted its potential until the faddish twenties arrived.

  It became known to millions more in that decade when it started appearing outside The World—and not in other papers but in books. On January 2, 1924, the aspiring publisher Dick Simon went for supper with his aunt Wixie, who asked him where she could get a book of Cross-Words for a niece who had become addicted to the puzzles in The World. Simon mentioned the query to his would-be business partner, Lincoln Schuster, and they discovered that no such book existed.

  On the one hand, this was good news: They had formed a publishing company but so far had no manuscripts to publish. On the other, their aspirations for Simon & Schuster were considerably higher than a collection of trivia(l) puzzles. The compromise was a corporate alias named after their telephone exchange: Plaza Publishing.

  The next difficulty was getting the puzzles. As a first step Simon and Schuster approached not Wynne but one of his subordinates. Margaret Petherbridge had been appointed as a subeditor by The World in 1920; being both young and a woman, she was assigned the suitably lowly task of fact-checking the crosswords to try to reduce the volume of letters of complaint (of which more later), and now found her intended career in journalism permanently on hold.

  Petherbridge was offered an advance of $25 to assemble enough puzzles for a book. Simon and Schuster decided to attach a sharpened pencil to every copy, priced it at $1.35, and spent their remaining prelaunch money on a one-inch ad in the New York World. Their campaign pushed the idea that the crossword was the Next Big Thing:

  1921—Coué

  1922—Mah Jong

  1923—Bananas

  1924—THE CROSS WORD PUZZLE BOOK

  Long-shot business ventures rarely end well—the typical results are penury and shame. But the stories of failure are not often told, and this is not one of them. This is one of those familiar but wholly anomalous stories of unlikely triumph—where a bookseller friend of Simon buys twenty-five copies as a gesture of friendship but has to order thousands more; where The World’s top columnist, Franklin P. Adams, had predicted that Simon and Schuster would “lose their shirts,” only to start a piece four months later with the announcement: “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! The Cross-Word Puzzle Book is out today.”

  It is also a story where:

  •each of the four collections published that year topped the nonfiction bestseller list

  •the second edition, priced at a more modest 25¢, received from the keenest of the distributors an order for 250,000 copies—then unprecedented in book publishing

  •Simon & Schuster’s crossword compilations became the longest continuously published book series

  It was the making of one of the major world publishers, and as rival firms produced their own puzzle series, it was excellent news for publishing in general—especially as, unlike pesky authors producing books of fiction or non-, crossword constructors would work for little or even no pay. The only downside for publishers was a side effect of the fierce competition: In case of low sales, Simon & Schuster offered to take back unsold crossword collections from bookshops, thereby instigating the practice of “returns,” very beneficial to megachains but increasing the element of risk for publishers ever since.

  It was also the making of the crossword. The most intense interest in crosswords ever was in midtwenties America, and was largely centered on books of puzzles. It was only later that the newspaper reclaimed its status as the default home of the crossword. However, perhaps even more important than the number of solvers solving was the way the form matured. In 1926 Margaret Petherbridge had taken the name Farrar following her marriage to John C. Farrar, founder of another publishing giant, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. As Margaret Farrar, she tidied up the messy conventions of crosswording: She may have become involved with puzzling by chance, but she thought deeply and effectively about what made one crossword better than another.

  Modern-day solvers (or “solutionists,” as they were sometimes described in the twenties) baffled by Wynne’s system for numbering clues have Farrar to thank for the cleaner “1 across” format, saving them, across a lifetime of solving, hours lost to tracing and connecting “F,” say, to “7.” Her preference for answers of at least three letters makes for a more satisfying experience, and the aesthetics she proposed for the grid are now characteristic of all puzzles (with the exception of some of the more willfully experimental examples we will meet along the way in this book).

  Margaret Farrar’s parameters for an aesthetically pleasing grid are symmetry, a minimum letter-count of three in answers, and “all-over interlock”—in layman’s speak, the grid does not have separate sections and the solver can travel from any part of it to another.

  Farrar’s ingenuity was finally rewarded in 1942 when she became The New York Times’s first crossword editor. Wynne had quietly retired in 1918 and died in Clearwater, Florida, in 1945. When the first crosswords appeared, he had wished to patent the format. Lacking the necessary funds for the process, however, he asked The World to contribute and was told by business manager F. D. White and assistant manager F. D. Carruthers that “it was just one of those puzzle fads that people would get tired of within six months.” In 1925, he did, however, obtain a patent for “an improvement or variation of the well-known cross word puzzle” in which the cells formed a kind of rhombus. Sadly, for him, it never took off.

  Yet we crossword lovers should be very glad that Wynne failed to “own” the crossword. Even if such a claim were enforceable, given the puzzle’s obvious debt to earlier diversions, it is precisely the freedom of the format and the deviations from its original structure that have made crosswords such a rich format and such a satisfying pastime. Had the crossword been patented, it would indeed have been quickly forgotten and filed under “obsolete wordplay,” between the clerihew and the cryptarithm.

  (The clerihew, by the by, was a form of comic verse that contained the name of a well-known person. And the cryptarithm, also known as the alphametic, was a mathematical puzzle in which an arithmetical proposition has its numbers replaced by letters. Neither, so far as I know, ever achieved sufficient popularity to be rendered in the form of cookies, earrings, or novelty songs. Unlike . . .)

&nbs
p; ALL THE RAGE, BUT BEGINNING TO FADE?

  FAD

  How Americans celebrated the crossword—but the British were not so sure

  In 1920s America, fads were quite the vogue. Flappers had the Charleston, the stock market had dangerous overspeculation, and it seemed that everyone had the crossword. The very look of a crossword grid was, for a while, chic: Black-and-white squares adorned earrings, dresses, and collar pins, and it was reported that checked patterns in general had never been in such demand.

  The most opulent manifestation of the craze was a Broadway revue, Puzzles of 1925, which features a scene in a crossword puzzle sanatorium filled with those driven to madness by clueing fever. Its lyrics echoed the papers’ concern about home wrecking: “The house has gone to ruin / Since all that Mother’s doin’ / Is putting letters in the little squares.” At the same time, various songwriters used crosswords as romantic analogy: “Cross Words Between My Sweetie and Me” by the Little Ramblers and “Crossword Mama You’re Puzzling Me” by Papalia & His Orchestra, not to mention “Cross Word Papa (You Sure Puzzle Me)” by Josie Miles.

  Crosswords began to appear in the most unlikely areas of public life: Puzzle competitions between Yale and Harvard were to be expected, perhaps less so those between New York’s fire brigade and police department before packed houses at Wanamaker’s Auditorium.

  The church was not immune, as seen by witnesses of the celebrated incidence of the Reverend George McElveen of Pittsburgh, who rendered a sermon in the form of a puzzle and asked worshippers to solve the clues before the preaching began.

  The British, too, caught on, though not without a fight from the nation’s moral guardians. The first crossword in a British publication appeared quietly in February 1922, in Pearson’s Magazine. More appeared over the next few years, but these tended to be found in books, not in newspapers. It was not just that the papers were slow to see the puzzle’s appeal; they were actively hostile to the very notion of the crossword.

  They warned nervous citizens of the damage this scourge was already doing to American citizens. In December 1924 an editorial in the London Times had the chilling headline AN ENSLAVED AMERICA. The crossword, it explained, “has grown from the pastime of a few ingenious idlers into a national institution: a menace because it is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society.” Solvers could, it seemed, be seen “quite shamelessly” staring at their grids, morning, noon, and night . . .

  ...cudgeling their brains for a four-letter word meaning “molten rock” or a six-letter word meaning “idler,” or what not: in trains and trams, or omnibuses, in subways, in private offices and counting-rooms, in factories and homes, and even—although as yet rarely—with hymnals for camouflage, in church.

  The choice of “idler” as an example of a clue is not, I suspect, an idle one. As with video games and recreational drugs, crosswords alarmed the self-appointed defenders of morality because people who are solving a crossword are simply enjoying themselves. Five million man-hours, warned the London Times’s New York correspondent, were being lost every day as workers forgot their duty to contribute to the gross national product, lost in the pure pleasure of finding synonyms.

  And because of this, the Tamworth Herald reported in the same year, pernicious puzzles “have been known to break up homes.” This family wrecking comes about when husbands spend time solving a clue rather than earning a crust. The solution of one concerned policeman was to enforce on addicts a ration of three puzzles a day, with ten days’ imprisonment if a fourth was attempted.

  In February 1925 the London Times announced that crosswords had, with “the speed of a meteorological depression,” crossed the Atlantic. “The nation still stands before the blast,” the paper thunders, “and no man can say it will stand erect again.” Prepare yourself for some mayhem.

  “The damage caused to dictionaries in the library at Wimbledon by people doing cross-word puzzles,” we read later that year, “has been so great that the committee has withdrawn all the volumes.” Across the capital, in Willesden, it was the same sad story. Dulwich Library, meanwhile, started blacking out the white squares of crossword grids with a heavy pencil, “to prevent any one person from keeping a newspaper for more than a reasonable length of time.”

  Those selfish paper-hogging solvers! Meanwhile, booksellers bemoaned falling sales of the novel—no longer itself considered a menace to society—in favor of “dictionaries, glossaries, dictionaries of synonyms, &c.” The Nottingham Evening Post went on:

  The picture theaters are also complaining that cross-words keep people at home. They get immersed in a problem and forget all about Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, and the other stars of the film constellation.

  And it gets worse. In another part of Nottingham—poor puzzle-blighted Nottingham—the zookeeper was swamped in correspondence. The reason? Crosswords, of course. He listed some of the inquiries that were keeping him from his animals:

  What is a word of three letters meaning a female swan? What is a female kangaroo, or a fragile creature in six letters ending in TO?

  (That would be PEN, DOE, and . . . I’m not sure. There’s a mackerel-like fish called the BONITO . . . ?) Meantime, across town at the theater, the stage was bare because one Mr. Matheson Lang, absorbed in a puzzle, had missed his entrance. “This caused him much chagrin,” reported the local press, “for he is extremely conscientious as regards his stage work.”

  Who was safe from this funk? Surely the world of grocery was unblighted? Apparently not:

  A girl asked a busy grocer to name the different brands of flour he kept. When he had done so, expecting a sale, she said she didn’t want to buy any. She just thought one of the names might fit into a cross-word puzzle she was doing.

  Worrying stuff. Happily for society at large, the crossword was soon to find itself pursued by the law. Prizes had started appearing for puzzles—another symptom of the something-for-nothing culture, tutted the London Times—along with a new variant on the crossword that would seem very unfamiliar to the solver of today.

  By the end of 1926 the News of the World, The People, the Daily Sketch, and the Sunday Graphic were among the papers to print prize crosswords, which were not only “pay-to-play” but had multiple clues for which there was more than one correct answer.

  The grids contained far more black squares than normal grids—the reason for which became clear when you reached a clue such as “You look forward to getting this when you are in hospital.” Solvers who hoped that their choice between BETTER and LETTER would be decided by a B or an L in another clue found that there was no such other clue. The crucial squares stood alone. If you did manage to complete the grid correctly, a prize was offered—but those ambiguities ensured that the number of “correct” entries for each puzzle would be tiny.

  The immense popularity of these puzzles made them very lucrative for the syndicates and newspapers that created them, and court summons were issued by the police, who insisted that the puzzles were not crosswords at all but thinly disguised lotteries. A lawyer for the police argued at London’s top magistrates’ court that “the words are ridiculously easy, and a child of 12 should have no difficulty in solving them.” At times it seemed that the crossword itself was on trial: Thanks to the Betting and Lotteries Bill, it became literally as well as morally criminal.

  However, the genuine crossword benefited in invidious comparison: As the judges shut down the lotteries, the puzzle survived. Indeed, the crossword was on the way to becoming respectable. The London Telegraph had started publishing one on July 30, 1925, and by the end of the decade, the London Times had started to wonder if these puzzles weren’t so bad after all. Or, in the words of BBC correspondent Martin Bell, whose father was the London Times’s first constructor, the paper “was losing circulation hand-over-fist to the Telegraph because the Telegraph had the new-fangled American fashion, the crossword, so the Times had to get one pre
tty sharpish.”

  The motivation might have been financial and the about-face a tad hypocritical after all the scaremongering, but the appearance on February 1, 1930, of a puzzle in the paper with the slogan “Top People take The Times” marked the crossword’s move to unambiguous respectability. Soon The Spectator and The Listener followed, and the British press began to rely on puzzles for a good, and indisputable, proportion of its newsstand sales, as some readers would buy a copy, have a bash at the crossword, then throw the paper away unread.

  When that first constructor for the London Times, Adrian Bell, was told by his own father that he would be constructing puzzles, he replied, “But Father, I haven’t even solved a crossword puzzle,” only to be told, “Well, you’ve got just ten days to learn!” Bell learned fast and went on to write such well-loved clues as “Die of cold? (3,4)” and “Spoils of War (4).”

  (Answers in the chapter FAIR. But first there is a whole new language to master . . .)

  INSIDE BASEBALL’S LANGUAGE?

  JARGON

  The metaphors of the crossword puzzle

  When the crossword first appeared, its mechanics were described in detail that is tediously verbose to today’s solver. Indeed, Arthur Wynne did not speak of “grids” or even “clues” (“Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions”) since the vocabulary of crosswording had yet to evolve.

  Even “grid,” in the sense of the lines on maps and diagrams, did not appear until the First World War, which means that it was not really available as a way of describing the layout of the first puzzles. And it’s a grisly metaphor, too: The real-life gridiron was a lattice-shaped arrangement of metal bars useful for griddling food—or torturing people. But perhaps, if you’re stuck on a Sunday afternoon with an especially tricky southeastern corner of your grid unfilled, the metaphor is apt.