by Alan Connor
I discovered that around three in ten British adults attempt a crossword at least once a week, and that of solvers as a whole (72 percent solve at least occasionally), one in five says that his or her choice of newspaper has been influenced by its crossword. Newspaper proprietors might want to consider whether it’s the puzzle page that is keeping physical sales from falling to zero, and constructors might feel emboldened to ask for a long-overdue pay raise.
However, even taking the most positive interpretation—that crosswords are the only remaining reason for buying a physical copy of a newspaper—the crossword approached its centenary year treading water rather than powering forward in a butterfly.
Crossworders, both constructors and solvers, might benefit from their puzzle of choice switching to another paper medium, or ponder how the experience of a puzzle with the same grid and clues might change its form in different mediums: newsprint, online (on-screen or printed out), and apps for smartphones and tablets.
On paper, the crossword is a physical activity, albeit not one that is likely to make practitioners break into a sweat. For some, the pleasure is tactile.
Orlando—a staggeringly prolific constructor who has been in the business since 1975—created a crossword site in the early days of the World Wide Web; in 2012 he reflected that online solvers seem to prefer to see on-screen something very like what they see on paper. “There’s no demand for the bells and whistles,” he noted—those potential bells and whistles including “hyperlinks, sound, pictures, video, and so on.” Just use your imagination . . .
For those solvers accustomed by school to completing exercises by making marks on paper, who knows, there may remain in the future a vestigial two-dimensional form of the crossword. If the experience of home printing ever becomes less horrific than it is now, he or she may be printing off a daily puzzle rather than buying it from a kiosk, surrounded by all that other bumf.
One vision of this future comes from the London technology company Berg Cloud, which has produced a small home printer that automatically and inklessly produces, each morning and on thermal paper, something that is a little like a newspaper, but not quite, the aim being to reduce the cost and bother of choosing material and running it through a conventional printer. Users choose from features such as news, to-do lists, and puzzles for consumption on the bus or train, for example: The available items include sudokus and a super-quick version of the London Times crossword that contains one across and one down clue (super-quick, that is, assuming that they are the right two clues for your mood on a given weekday).
After the initial setup of the Berg Cloud printer, the puzzles are simply there, every day, just like they are in the newspapers. Indeed, the past propagation of puzzles is explained in part by their presence in a paper. The crossword might not be your destination when you buy a paper—and, typically, it doesn’t have anything to do with news—but a sufficiently long journey or a day with sufficiently grim reports might divert you to the crossword page: the only part of a paper that offers instant interactivity. The potential new solver is buying a crossword without realizing that he or she is doing so. But as newspapers become sprawling websites, some with a separate price package for the puzzles, the cost of entry rises.
Even for the seasoned and paid-up solver, the digital crossword is in danger of getting lost. On a smartphone or tablet, every other format of entertainment and communication is converging to jostle for the limited attention of the user of a single device—and most of the other “gaming” options are germane to their form, asking to be swiped, tilted, stroked, and tapped in new and gratifying ways: the touch screen equivalents of Orlando’s “bells and whistles.”
Such things are not alien to the crossword: As early as 1982 the American cryptic evangelist Henry Hook, whose career was described in The New Yorker as “one long effort to subvert our safe assumptions about puzzles, to make them as unsettling and unpredictable as art,” showcased another approach. It was a puzzle called “Sound Thinking,” in which many of the clues were announced over a loudspeaker, his contribution to the 1982 US Open Crossword Puzzle Championship, and a perfect ten of context plus content.
The challenge for crossword constructors and editors is to make wordplay work in the devices that are replacing print. New types of clue, using nonverbal hints, seem certain to emerge: Some may become part of the standard armory; some will branch off to make new kinds of puzzles, using colors, sounds, and shapes, which may or may not be called “crosswords.”
So far, most of the features publishers have added to crosswords have been along the same lines as those that adorn news: shareability and other social accessories such as leaderboards for the speediest solvers (see the chapter FAST above). But crosswords are not like news; they’re not made up of facts but are abstract edifices in which words are spelled out in unconventional directions. Those directions currently number two—across and down—but more are possible.
One possible direction of travel is suggested by another look at The Neighbor’s Home Mail and the puzzle in its twentieth-century incarnation. The 1874 “crossword” could be re-presented as a straight line of cells into which the solver writes the word MORNING: essentially a single across entry. For newsprint crosswords, the “grid” metaphor expands the area of play to a plane. Now screens can take their users in more than two dimensions, and metaphors other than a grid or a plane may explode into view while the crossword remains recognizable as a crossword.
The constructor Eric Westbrook is a teacher; he is also legally blind. For him, there is nothing inevitable about limiting the directions of clues to across and down, and he has quietly shown an amazing way of subtly rethinking the crossword.
When Westbrook constructs a puzzle, the analogy he uses is an apartment block. Each square becomes a room, and the words may be spelled out in front of you, to your right, or down through the stories beneath your feet. While the crossword is more engrossing, solving it does not, as you might suspect, take a lot of getting used to: The solver soon forgets that there’s anything out of the ordinary going on and engages with the clues and entries.
As Eric points out, most solvers could walk through their own homes blindfolded. “I walk around three-dimensional grids until I know them inside out and all the letters are in their places. It’s not quick—but it’s certainly easier than doing a school timetable.” Here is a partially filled grid in which, if you adjust your eyes to reading in different directions, you can see the answers starting from square one, CHARING operating as an across, CHALK as a regular down (now going away from the solver) and CROSS reading (down) down.
Currently, Eric’s puzzles exist in a two-dimensional medium. Having filled his grids, he recruits established constructors to set the clues and prints the puzzles as calendars to raise money for children’s charities. He is certainly a maverick, but that doesn’t mean he’s completely out on his own: There are others, too, building in a third dimension. The Listener puzzle series (see the chapter SONDHEIM above) may be printed on the flat pages of the London Times, but it has asked its solvers to cut out its grids and restructure them in the form of a Rubik’s Cube, the one-sided loop known as a Möbius strip, and even the abstract single-surfaced Klein bottle. If any puzzle embraces time as the fourth dimension—a grid in which the correct letters depend on what day it is, say—it will surely be The Listener.
Another exciting new direction was suggested by Tracy Gray in a New York Times puzzle based on the “right turn on red” traffic instruction. In its down clues, if the solver encountered the letters RED, he or she changed direction, so, for example, INSHREDS, CLAIREDANES, and CHEEREDON become:
I
C
C
N
L
H
S
A
H
I
E
R E D S
R E D A N E S
and
R E D O N
Deviating from across and down does not mean that these crosswords are not crosswords. It merely suggests that, just as words can currently inhabit spaces above and below one another, the puzzles of the future may place them in front of and behind one another. Which is not really so big a change, is it?
(So, while the crossword remains a physical activity, let us say good-bye to its newsprint form with a pseudoscientific investigation into what your choice of writing device reveals about you . . .)
TO ACCOMPLISH A PENCIL, SAY?
IMPLEMENT
Your character as revealed by how you complete a puzzle
Pen: You prefer deductive reasoning. You expect ambiguity to resolve itself and to remain resolved. You know that each entry in the grid is waiting for one and only one word, and you withhold judgment until you are sure which one word that is. Then you can look at the crossing answers safe in the knowledge that the letters entered are correct. For you, the basic unit of information in a puzzle is The Clue. You may come unstuck, however, when The Clue equally suggests two answers and only the crossing letters reveal which is The Entry.
Pencil: You are one for inductive reasoning. You accept that even when something appears to be the case, you may have overlooked some key piece of information. You build your interpretation of the world and of a grid tentatively. You demand as much information as possible before you commit. For you, the most important unit of information in a puzzle is The Grid, and each answer depends on more than its clue. You may come unstuck when the space for a tricky clue is filled with lightly scrawled letters, some correct and some incorrect.
Wax crayon: You are desperate to solve, traveling with no writing implements other than something of your child’s (now fourteen) that you have inexplicably found in a pocket. You will come unstuck when the crayon becomes so blunt that each letter fills four squares at once.
RESOURCES
The resources I found most useful and which are most recommended for further reading are:
The blogs Fifteensquared, Times for the Times, and Big Dave’s Crossword Blog
of enormous use to cryptic newcomers and incidentally the only way of recovering half-remembered clues and devices
Don Manley’s Chambers Crossword Manual (Chambers, 2001)
the best explanation of the innards of puzzles
75 Years of the Times Crossword (HarperCollins UK, 2005)
an anniversary collection of puzzles and the reminiscences of editors, constructors, and solvers
A Clue to Our Lives: 85 Years of the Guardian Cryptic Crossword (Guardian Books, 2008)
Sandy Balfour’s stock-take of Guardian puzzles, constructors, and culture, and its sister volumes Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (Atlantic, 2003) and I Say Nothing (Atlantic, 2006)
From Square One: A Meditation, with Digressions, on Crosswords (Scribner, 2009)
a thoughtful, funny book by Dean Olsher that would be an excellent read whatever its subject matter
The Strange World of the Crossword (M. & J. Hobbs, 1974)
Roger Millington’s rambunctious tour through the state of crosswording at the age of sixty-odd
Georges Perec’s Les Mots croisés, procédés de considérations de l’auteur sur l’art et la manière de croiser les mots (Mazarine, 1979)
the playful Frenchman’s philosophy of puzzling
Tony Augarde’s Oxford Guide To Word Games (Oxford University Press, 1984)
which also has chapters on letter games, alphabet games, Scrabble . . .
Wordplay (2006)
Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley’s documentary about American puzzlers
Timeshift: How to Solve a Cryptic Crossword (2008)
Georgina Harvey’s BBC documentary about the UK cryptic scene
This book also draws on, inter alia, Afrit’s Armchair Crosswords: A Book for Leisure Moments (Derek Harrison, 2009); CC Bombaugh’s Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature (Dover, 1961); the Oulipo collection La Littérature Potentielle: Créations, Re-créations, Récréations (Gallimard, 1973); Michael Smith’s Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (Pan, 2003); Marcel Danesi’s The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life (Indiana University Press, 2002); Ben Tausig’s The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Now (Race Point, 2013); the ‘pataphysicist Luc Etienne’s L’Art Du Contrepet (Pauvert, 1957); Stanley Newman’s Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid (Harper, 2006); Peter Schwed’s Turning the Pages: An Insider’s Story of Simon & Schuster 1924-1984 (Macmillan, 1984); Gilbert Renault’s Le Livre Du Courage Et De La Peur (Aux Trois Couleurs, 1945); The New York Times crossword blog Wordplay; the Jeremiah Farrell conversation with Johnny Gee at barelybad .com/xwdthemes_110596.htm; the charity calendar puzzles at calendarpuzzles.co.uk; the articles “The Riddler: Meet the Marquis de Sade of the Puzzle World” in The New Yorker and “A Funny Thing Happened To Stephen Sondheim” in La Scena Musicale, the Inspector Morse episode “The Settling of the Sun” and the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme.
The across answers to the telekinesis puzzle, by the way, are ERDA and EYED—and here is the solution, a century later, to Arthur Wynne’s first puzzle:
Across (top to bottom): FUN; SALES; RECEIPT; MERE; FARM; DOVE; RAIL; MORE; DRAW; HARD; TIED; LION; SAND; EVENING; EVADE; ARE. Down (left to right): DOH; MORAL; REVERIE; SERE; DOVE; FACE; NEVA; RULE; NARD; NEIF; SIDE; SPAR; TANE; TRADING; MIRED; LAD.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
All those with whom I learned to solve, including my brother Alexander, my late dad, Shaun Pye, Charlie Rowlands, Sean Walsh, Mark Chappell, and Lucy Brett.
The constructors who have guided me through their world including Araucaria, Rufus, Enigmatist, Quixote, Paul, Arachne, Monk, Azed, Tramp, Orlando, Puck, Shed, Brendan Emmett Quigley, Audreus, Gordius, Micawber, Goujeers, Trazom, Hot, and Philistine.
Those who have provided information and wisdom including Sean Walsh, David Bellos, Kathryn Friedlander, Noah Veltman, Anne R. Bradford, Denise Sutherland, Richard Browne, Mike Hutchinson, Peter Biddlecombe, Will Shortz, Evie Eysenburg, Nitsuh Abebe, Shuchi Upadhyay, Deb Ablem, Jane Teather, Charlotte Murray, Brendan Carr, Stephan Shakespeare, Faria Iqbal, Michael Price, Jane Sewell, Julian Mitchell, and Colin Dexter—and Eric Westbrook and Jerry Farrell for their puzzles.
From The Guardian: Janine Gibson, Hugh Stephenson, Kate Carter, Rachel Dixon, Pamela Hutchinson, and Rachel Holmes—and the readers of and commenters at The Guardian Crossword Blog.
Those who enabled this book to sit in your hands: my editor Brooke Carey and agent Andrew Gordon; others from publishing including my UK editor Helen Conford, Rose Goddard, Leslie Hansen, Stefan McGrath, and Jessica Sindler.
For feeding and watering my playing with words: my English teacher Kenneth Fitzell and my mum.
For waiting: Lucy and Raphael.
INDEX
Abbreviations, 47, 101, 122
Abebe, Nitsuh, 144
Across
book section defined, xi
creating numbering system, 11
origin of jargon, 20–21
Acrostics (puzzle), 7, 21–25, 32, 86, 134, 144. See also Mnemonics
Adams, Franklin P., 9
Addiction, crosswording as
cheating and, 95–96
depiction in TV and movies, 137–138
enforcement of punishment, 15
hold on Victorian England, 22
impact on relationships, 109–112
lure of cryptic crossword to, 76–78
/>
researching motivations, 98–99
satisfying need for puzzles, 8
sharing experience with others, 113–115
The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green (Bede), 24
Afrit’s Injunction, 37–39
“A Funny Thing Happened to Stephen Sondheim” (Lebrecht), 177
Age-related mental health, crosswording and, 97–102
Alhaddad, Sawsan (Dr.), 131–132
All About Steve (movie), 115
“All-over interlock,” 11, 49, 80, 95, 163
Alphametic (aka cryptarithm), 12
Alzheimer’s, staving off onset, x, 97–102
American Civil War, 162–164
American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
1999 competition, 74–75
2012 competition, 119–121
competition stress and pressure, 103–104
training tips, 106–108
Anagram (puzzle), 4, 25–28, 60, 79, 82–87, 114, 125, 157
Anderson, John B., 65
Antonyms, 101
Archer, Lord Jeffrey, 67, 78, 87–88
Armchair Crosswords: A Book of Leisure Moments (Ritchie), 37, 177
Armstrong, Lance, 66
Artificial intelligence, 119
Artificial language, 7, 34
The Art of the Spoonerism (Étienne), 71