Introducing: Crossword Craze
2024 is experiencing a crossword craze. The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held each year in Stamford, Connecticut, had to turn people away for the first time. Magazines are adding or reviving puzzle sections. Apple and Hearst have entered the mobile crossword game. Speed solving tournaments with punny names are being held from Berkeley (Westwords) to Boston (Boswords) and beyond.
Today’s craze is an echo of the excitement about crosswords exactly a century ago. On April 10, 1924, the first edition of The Cross Word Puzzle Book was published. Fearing failure or, worse, accusations of frivolity, Simon & Schuster published it under a dummy imprint. But the book was a runaway success. “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! The crossword puzzle book is out today!” cooed Franklin Pierce Adams, who’d been worried that Margaret Farrar (then Petherbridge), F. Gregory Hartswick, and Prosper Buranelli—the book’s compilers—would “lose their shirts.” The paper they all worked for, The New York World, had months earlier called a crossword book “the worst idea since Prohibition.”
The 1924 craze gave rise to crossword fashion, comics, songs, and more, which this project will chronicle. We’ll post ephemeral gems from the crossword archives, publishing them on the same day they appeared in 1924—starting with the event that launched a thousand pencils, the April 10 publication of The Cross Word Puzzle Book. We hope a trip through the archives will be pleasurable in itself, and help explain, per Margaret Farrar, how the crossword became “the longest flash in the pan in history.”
