The first New York Times crossword ran on Sunday, February 15, 1942, with Farrar as editor, and became a daily feature on September 11, 1950. “You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword.” “I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world,” she wrote. To bolster his suggestion, the editor attached a letter from the crossword pioneer Margaret Petherbridge Farrar. joined the hostilities, the New York Times’ Sunday editor sent a memo to the publisher saying they “ought to proceed with the puzzle” to give readers something to do during those bleak blackout hours. A 1924 editorial in the Times called crosswords “a primitive sort of mental exercise.”īut the war that began for America in 1941 gave crossword puzzles an important new function: escaping the woes of the news pages. The crossword fad, however, plagued librarians, who complained that puzzle “fans” were swarming the reference desk, clamoring for dictionaries and encyclopedias to help find answers, and pushing aside more “legitimate” readers and students.Ĭrosswords were now being published almost everywhere-except in the New York Times, the last major metropolitan newspaper to offer the puzzle. One clue asked, “What this puzzle is.” Answer: “Hard.” Unlike today’s grids, Wynne’s had no internal black squares. There was even a 1924 song called “Cross-word Mamma You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out).” The activity had become so prevalent that the Times of London decried it in an editorial called “An Enslaved America.” Devotees spiced their conversation with obsolete words that were cropping up in crossword puzzles.
Solving crosswords could fairly be called a craze. Other changes, like outlawing two-letter words, came later.Īmerica had now tasted the satisfaction of creating order out of chaos, the Zen of making something from nothing. The league began the process of standardizing the appearance of crosswords as early as 1924, instituting rules such as “all over interlock,” which meant that no part of the grid could be completely cut off by the black squares only one-sixth of the squares could be black and the grid design had to be symmetrical. The book eventually sold more than 100,000 copies, perhaps spurred on by groups like the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, itself a creation of marketing-savvy Simon & Schuster. The first run sold out quickly and the company ran additional printings. The publisher needn’t have been concerned the book was an immediate success. The first crossword puzzle book-an untested and decidedly nonliterary format-worried the firm so much that the firm’s name did not appear on the book, which had a small printing of 3,600 copies.
NEWPAPER CROSSWORDS FREE
Lincoln Schuster, who had recently opened a publishing house in New York, honored the pleas of Simon’s puzzle-loving aunt and printed a collection of crosswords, throwing in a free pencil to sweeten the deal.
Thus Arthur Wynne is credited as the inventor of what is arguably the first mobile game-the American-style crossword puzzle, notable for its intellectual challenge and definitional yet amusing clues. An illustrator later accidentally changed “Word-Cross” to “Cross-Word,” with no objection from Wynne, and the name stuck.įather of crosswords: The New York World’s Arthur Wynne came to the U.S. He inserted “fun” at the top as the first “across” entry and called it “Word-Cross.” Some of the clues required readers to know esoteric facts (apparently “nard” is an aromatic plant that grows mainly in the Himalayas), but others were puckish. Perhaps inspired by those, as well as the “Sator” square, an ancient, five-word Latin palindrome, Wynne designed a numbered, diamond-shape grid with an empty center. The Christmas edition of “Fun,” the jokes and puzzles supplement he managed, was being laid out and Wynne felt readers needed a new challenge.Ī Liverpool native, Wynne had emigrated to the United States at age 19, but before he did he might have seen some rudimentary word-form puzzles, which were popular in late 19th-century England. On a blustery winter day in 1913, Arthur Wynne sat in his office at the New York World and wrestled with a problem.
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