The crossword craze of the mid-1920s infiltrated all aspects of popular culture, and that included the realm of newspaper comics. One hundred years ago today, cartoonist and humorist Clare Briggs dedicated a full-color Sunday page to a crossword-solving exchange between the characters Joe and Vi, the titular stars of his
In the month since The Cross Word Puzzle Book was published, it had become a phenomenon. A larger version of the fad-focused ad that had run in newspapers appeared in Publisher's Weekly on May 10, 1924, now with a timeline of the first three days of orders and
Lucy Jeanne Price was a syndicated columnist whose "New York Letter" carried dispatches from the Big Apple to the rest of the country. On May 6, 1924, Price broke some momentous news from the crossword world. There is nothing too serious or too light to be the subject
A hundred years ago today a venerable tradition began: the New York Times pooh-poohing crosswords. The puzzles were dead on arrival, per the Times; "Cross Word Puzzles Embalmed Between Covers," went the title of the paper's review of April's The Cross Word Puzzle Book.
As the month of May 1924 began, Dick Simon and Max Schuster (still doing business as the Plaza Publishing Company) had something to crow about. The Cross-Word Puzzle Book, their dubious first publishing venture, was a runaway success and could already be dubbed a best-seller. Here is the ad for
The Cross Word Puzzle Book was an instant success for a variety of reasons. For one thing, crossword puzzles had become a fad — in an era where fads themselves were enjoying a moment — but they had to that point been dripped out in weekly publications. The book was released into
In an earlier post, we made the acquaintance of New York World columnist Heywood Broun and his crossword-obsessed wife Ruth Hale. The new crossword craze is once again featured in the Apr. 22, 1924 installment of Broun's syndicated column "It Seems to Me," in which crosswords
In February, 1914, Arthur Wynne—whose December 1913 “Word-Cross” birthed the American crossword as we know it—challenged solvers to transform themselves into contributors: “FUN’s crossword puzzles apparently are getting more popular than ever. The puzzle editor has received from readers many interesting new cross-word puzzles, which he will
On Apr. 19, 1924, readers of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle would have found in the bottom corner of page 5 an endorsement of the newly published Cross Word Puzzle Book, colorfully written and ending in a jarring non-sequitur. If you have any desire to go mad in the quickest and
Among the early adopters of crosswords were the New York literati of the Algonquin Round Table. We've already met the leading light of Franklin P. Adams, aka FPA, whose column in The New York World, "The Conning Tower," carried humorous dispatches of the nascent crossword craze.
The New York World humor columnist Franklin P. Adams, who typically went by FPA, played a pivotal role in getting “The Cross Word Puzzle Book” made, and printed a couplet to celebrate its release. (There's more detail in our post marking the book’s publication.) His syndicated column,
When the crossword craze kicked off a hundred years ago, there initially weren't that many newspapers regularly publishing crosswords besides the New York rival outlets of The World (where the puzzle format was invented) and The Herald Tribune. One other paper that got in early on the crossword