Foster's Circle-Word Puzzles

Richard Allen

— 6 min read
Foster's Circle-Word Puzzles

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 crossword books, would a constructor pivot to such an unwieldy new design? “Each composer, or newspaper, seems to favor a particular pattern. The form selected for the puzzles in the following pages is original with me, and registered as a trade mark,” writes Foster in the book’s introduction. Every Circle-Word is prominently labeled “Trade Mark,” and one can imagine Foster thought he'd earn more in syndication revenue from puzzles in a format in which he held exclusive rights.

Games were a business to Foster, and apparently a good one. The frontmatter of the 1922 edition of Foster’s Complete Hoyle: An Encyclopedia of Games, first published in 1897, describes him as “Author of Sixty-Nine Books on Cards and Other Indoor Games.”  Foster also wrote a bridge column for Vanity Fair and is an acknowledged discoverer of a bridge principle known as the “Rule of Eleven.” He was a major force in popularizing contract bridge, a sensation in the late 1920s just before the introduction of auction bridge sent the game’s popularity into overdrive.

In Foster's day, experts of his ilk rooted their claims regarding the merits of particular play patterns primarily on personal experience and conviction, and did not shy away from high-profile disagreements, as documented in bridge writer Wilbur C. Whitehead’s June 1926 Vanity Fair article “Overcalling a No-Trumper in Auction Bridge: In Which Some Exception is Taken to One of R. F. Foster’s Pet Theories” (“[In a previous article, Foster] attacks all the writers who disagree with him. In the past I have never troubled to answer any of Mr. Foster’s fulminations…”)

Foster brings the same opinionated sensibility to crossword puzzle construction. One of his beliefs was idiosyncratic even in Foster’s time: that crossword puzzles contained both too many crossings and too many kinds of clues, and as a result were far too easy. He writes:

💡
I have tried in the following pages to introduce a new form of cross-word puzzle, differing from the usual run of such puzzles in other ways than in the form of the diagram. In the first place, I believe that these puzzles can be made quite difficult enough by using the simplest Anglo-Saxon words, the shorter the better, and the more synonyms there are for such words the better. But I also believe in fewer crossings…

In studying the construction of the average cross-word puzzle, I have been impressed by the fact that they seem to furnish too many clues to the solution, an entirely unnecessary number in fact. There are so many crossings, for instance, that after one or two easy words have been found, the harder ones are practically outlined, and in many cases it is not necessary even to look at the key; the word finishes itself, automatically, as it were…

It has been my aim in these puzzles to restrict the solver to two or three crossing places, so as not to make so many words obvious, or nearly so, after not more than half the twenty-two words required have been found.

By the same token, Foster – described in one profile as a mnemonist – rejects proper names because the “keys” (clues) can’t be made vague enough to prevent them from leaping immediately to mind:

💡
I never use proper names, because I find that the key to them is too obvious, practically pointing out the name, or telling where it may be found. For example, one composer gives us as a key, ‘A great Persian monarch.’ As none of the modern ones have been great, we turn at once to Cyrus, but as six letters are wanted, it must be Darius.

True to his word, Foster constructed puzzles with fewer crossings and points of connectivity than his peers. In fact, one of the three segments of each Circle-Word is severed from the other segments for no apparent reason, and the puzzle’s central entries, each thirteen letters long, have only three and two crossings respectively.

Here we arrive at the enduring mystery of Foster's Circle-Word Puzzles: Foster thought his puzzles so easy that he didn't include any answers. “So sure am I that any persons of ordinary intelligence can solve any cross-word puzzle that I make no offer of solutions to those in this volume,” he writes.

So: can a skilled crossword solver in the year 2024, armed with every free research tool on the Internet, recover the lost solution of even a single one of these puzzles?

I was not enthusiastic about my chances after reading the following passage:

💡
As a rule, synonyms [in clues] are selected which have a very different number of letters from the word wanted, or which are so little known that they will be about the last thing thought of. The only objection to them is that they are usually so easy to look up in any of the many books of synonyms now published, yet I have known a very good solver to get hopelessly stuck on an eight-letter synonym for “head.” He had tried “Director” and “Commence,” but found they did not fit in with later developments, which indicated that part of the synonym wanted for head should be this:

C O - - P - - E

I trust it is not necessary to tell the reader what the word was.

Though I fear the answer is staring me in the face, scouring a variety of online sources has so far failed to turn up an appropriate entry matching this letter pattern. “Conspire,” by far the most common word with that pattern, doesn’t mean “head.” “Conepate,” a dated term for skunk?

I did eventually emerge with a potential solution to the first Circle-Word of the book (see below).

I can't say it was a smooth solve. Foster's clues are at times maddeningly vague. I think the answer to “A source of sweetness” is BEE and “a separator” is SIEVE, but I could really use a little more confirmation.

Additionally, it's a convention of contemporary cluing that clues should agree with their answers with regard to number, tense, part of speech, and so forth. It should be possible, we agree, to replace the answer, used in a sentence, with the clue. This was apparently not the case in 1924, and Foster's clues more than once suggest that an answer will be an adjective when it is in fact a noun, or an adjective when it is a verb. [Chiefly for children] is his clue for TOYS, and [Used in the marriage ceremony] for OBEY (though there's an outside chance this answer is ODES). I'm not sure why he wouldn't have written “items chiefly...” or “verb used...” unless his goal was, again, to crank up the difficulty of what he felt were trivially easy puzzles.

And Foster's claim that his puzzles eschew exotic words in favor of familiar “Anglo-Saxon” ones – the book’s dedication is to “SOLVERS WHO LIKE SIMPLE ANGLO-SAXON WORDS” – is rather undermined by the presence of FIBROUS, from the Latin “fibra,” among others.

Finally, one wonders how and why Foster selected the thirteen-letter central entries, which could have been any single word of that length starting with a C and ending with an S, and one starting with a P and having A as its seventh letter. There are dozens of options in each case, though Foster appears to have settled on CIRCUMSTANCES and PROGRESSIVELY. (I suppose he didn’t want to waste a clue like [A state of affairs].)

A final historical footnote: Foster praises what might have been the first ever misdirect clue, given that he describes it as “famous” less than a year after the crossword craze began:

💡
If the idea is more far fetched, or has a whimsical turn, it may be more difficult than the synonym, although very obvious when found, like Carolyn Wells’ famous key, “A little shaver,” which leads one to think of all manner of small boys, instead of a ‘‘razor.”

Wells was a prolific and well-known author in many genres, including light verse and mystery novels, and her biographer, Rebecca Rego Barry, argues that “there is a case to be made” that she was “the first New York Times crossword puzzle editor.” Wells published a book entitled “Carolyn Wells’ Crossword Puzzles” in 1924 that unfortunately does not contain the “little shaver” puzzle.

Read more