![Cross-Word Puzzlers to Hold [10-Letter Word Meaning Meet]](/content/images/size/w600/2024/05/24-05-16-nyht-p1-1.jpg)
The crossword convention was coming! Lucy Jeanne Price broke the news in her May 6, 1924 syndicated column, but other journalists amplified the drumbeat in the days leading up to the May 18th convention in New York. One newspaper that gave the convention plenty of advance hype was the New
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
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
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
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.
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
When The Cross Word Puzzle Book was published on Apr. 10, 1924, the editors mostly relied on submissions from readers of The New York World – whatever was sitting unpublished in the drawer of Margaret Petherbridge (soon to be Farrar). One of those submissions appeared as Puzzle No. 3 in the
When Dick Simon and Max Schuster published The Cross Word Puzzle Book in the spring of 1924, they weren't brave enough to put their own names on it, using "The Plaza Publishing Company" as the imprint (after their telephone exchange, PLaza). Little did they know they