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.
#Ny times crossword editor 1942 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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