November 26, 1924 saw the publication of Foster’s Circle-Word Puzzles by R.F. Foster, a book of crosswords that are also circular. Try to solve one and I think you’ll agree: these puzzles certainly are circular. Why, less than a year after the publication of the first two
In August 1924, just four months after the publication of the book that set off the crossword craze, Richard Simon and Max Schuster were back with a new collection, dubbed The Cross Word Puzzle Book, Second Series. And unlike the first time around, when the publishers were too wary to
Three months after the first-ever crossword puzzle championship, held at the National Cross Word Puzzle Convention in New York on May 23, 1924, one newspaper columnist tried to stir up a good-natured rivalry between the top two competitors. As was widely reported at the time, the winner of that first
A common pop-cultural theme of the 1924 crossword craze was the ruinous effect of the fad on marital bliss. We've already seen a number of examples poking fun at how crosswords were affecting marriages — even purportedly leading husbands and wives to trade blows. Domestic comedies were no stranger
As we've discussed in these pages, crossword puzzles had been around for a decade or so by the time The Cross Word Puzzle Book was published and the hobby snowballed into a craze in 1924. The format already had fans — and indeed, some of the earliest reviews seemed
Ever since the crossword craze kicked off on April 10, 1924 with The Cross Word Puzzle Book, a mystery had lingered in the publishing world. Who was behind the publication, which bore the nondescript imprint of the Plaza Publishing Company? A month and a half after the book appeared and
The New York Herald Tribune gave the crossword ample press in the early months of the craze, including coverage before and after the convention on May 18th. But not everyone writing for the Herald Tribune was on board. Published in the May 25th edition, Dorothy Homans’ humorous essay “Diana of
Here's another recap of the First National Cross Word Puzzle Convention of May 18, 1924, this one from the skeptics at The Boston Globe. "We vacillated," writes "Cross Ed" in the May 25th edition of the Globe, "as to whether or not we
On this day 100 years ago, the First National Cross Word Puzzle Convention took place in the Ambassador Hotel in New York City. We've already covered the announcement earlier in the month and some chatter leading up to it, but now the date is upon us. Admission was
![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
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