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:

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:

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:

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:

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.

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 even put their names on the title page (instead using the dummy imprint Plaza Publishing Company), the second book proudly bore the corporate name of "Simon and Schuster, Inc." A new publishing empire was born, all on the backs of a couple of puzzle anthologies.

Simon & Schuster knew they had a massive publishing hit right out of the gate, so plans for the Second Series took shape quickly. The publishers advertised in trade journals and magazines to build the hype. An ad in Publishers Weekly on July 26, 1924 began:

In the race for best-sellerdom The Cross Word Puzzle Book started out as a dark horse. Book-sellers were skeptical of a book one writes in rather than reads.
Six weeks after publication in April, The Cross Word Puzzle Book was ranked Number One on the non-fiction best-seller list at Brentano’s, and Number Four on the national ranking prepared by Baker and Taylor, advancing three weeks later to Number One—the best selling non-fiction book in America! Cross-Word Puzzling began to trump Bridge and pung Mah-Jong. This game of filling in the tantalizing word-patterns has all the raging intensity of a fad (“sweeping across the country with a whirlwind rush,” says The New York Times) plus the permanence of an instructive and absorbing pastime.
Like the first series, which has gone through edition after edition and is still a steady best-seller, The Second Cross Word Puzzle Book will contain fifty, never-before-published puzzles. The multitudes who have been spending hours over the first series will welcome the same format, the same price ($1.85) and again that life-saving pencil and eraser!

On Aug. 2, the first issue of a new magazine, The Saturday Review, hit the newsstands, and the promotional copy from Simon & Schuster was even more florid:

As the first issue of The Saturday Review goes to press, the best-selling non-fiction in America is The Cross Word Puzzle Book—a book that is totally different from any work ever before published. It has been called “The Great American Novelty,” for—
One does not read The Cross Word Puzzle Book—one writes in it. More than that, one lives in it. That itself is news. The enthusiasm for cross word puzzling has assumed the proportions and intensity of a nation-wide mania. Forty newspapers from coast to coast are featuring the cross word puzzle page once or twice a week.
Indoors, outdoors, at Newport and Coney Island; on Park Avenue and in Greenwich Village; in Gopher Prairie and in Pittsburgh; in Chautauqua and in Hollywood, cross word puzzles are the current rage; frenzied fans are forming cross word puzzle associations and staging tournaments to determine community championships.

In fact, the winner of the first crossword championship was pressed into service to write the preface for the new book. William A. Stern II, who bested all competitors in the contest held at the inaugural crossword convention on May 18, reminisced about his first encounter with the novel kind of puzzle and his immediate addiction to it.

Two years ago I saw a friend of mine earnestly studying a checkered diagram in the magazine section of a Sunday newspaper. Curiosity impelled me to ask him whether he had taken up cross-stitching, because the pattern he so zealously pored over resembled closely that of an old-fashioned sampler. When he explained that he was attempting to solve a puzzle I laughed, because in my ignorance I believed that puzzles were childish time-wasters. I snorted my disdain at this sort of balderdash and, angered, he challenged me to try my hand at it.
I confidently predicted that I would easily solve the foolish enigma and after he had explained the manner of solution I set to work. A few minutes later I started asking questions. What was one supposed to do? My friend explained a second time and I was all at sea. Finally I understood what to do, but was shaky on how to do it. I finished that puzzle the next day. I gave little thought to food and rest; in the end I triumphed.

The second Cross Word Puzzle Book was published on Aug. 10, and as editor Margaret Petherbridge (soon to be Farrar) would later recall, it was just as big a hit as the first book, selling 110,000 copies. At the end of August, The Saturday Review ran an enthusiastic notice:

Mah Jong may be passing as a fad, but Cross Word Puzzles are in their heydey. Of their second book of Cross Word Puzzles the enterprising publishers, who have taken the fad at its flood and ought to reap a golden harvest from the Cross Word-mad, remark “This book will give you one hundred hours of the best sort of fun.” Fun, yes—and agony! The writer of this note is a Cross Word Puzzlist in the duffer class, and has found the game as fascinating and as insidious as golf. Once an addict and you wake in the middle of the night burbling, “A six-letter word meaning to eradicate, a nine-letter word synonymous with plum duff!”
So here are fifty new puzzles, the book being edited by Prosper Buranelli, F. Gregory Hartswick and Margaret Petherbridge, the puzzles being furnished by various fine Italian hands. Buy it and you will probably estrange your family, divorce your wife, desert your children, ruin your business and devote your entire leisure (possibly in a nice, quiet cell) to the solution of “Seven Greek Crosses,” “Adam’s Rib” or “The Linoleum Pattern.” Alas and alack! Once having tasted blood, in the shape of a partial solution, the Cross Word Puzzlist is a gone goose! But at that you’d better try it; if only because, these days, “you may go where you please, you may skin up the trees, but you can’t get away from—The Cross Word Puzzle.”

With the promise of estranging your family and ruining your business, how could anyone resist?

(P.S.: Here in 2024, I'm starting up a newsletter, Zimmer on Language. Please consider subscribing to get dispatches from the world of words, and not just the kind that cross in a grid.)

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 crossword contest was William Stern II, who solved the championship puzzle in "10 minutes, 10 and two-fifths seconds." But as Nunnally Johnson reported in his column "One Word After Another" in the Aug. 20 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the second-place finisher, Miss Madeleine Marshall, was close behind and deserving of a rematch.

Johnson, who would go on to become a noted screenwriter and director, used his column to engage in a little lighthearted shit-stirring, treating the speed solvers as if they were rival prizefighters.

Why is William Stern 2d in Europe? Is he avoiding a fight? Does he intend to defend his title of world's champion cross-word puzzle solver this year—or is he going into the movies? Why has he not given Miss Madeleine Marshall, runner-up in the recent Cross-Word Puzzlers' Olympic Games, a chance at the crown? Is he afraid of her?
Cross-word puzzle fans the world over are asking these questions today—and so far there has not been a single answer, not even a postcard.
The above illustration illustrates—no, those two words oughtn't to go together—rather, the above diagram illustrates by what a narrow margin Mr. Stern came in first. It shows him at the three-quarter post, still strong, but patently tested to the utmost, with Miss Marshall only one run behind.
A few seconds later Mr. Stern brushed under the wire in the splendid time of 10 minutes 10 2-5 seconds. Miss Marshall was a close second, with something in the neighborhood of 11 minutes. The remainder of the field of 200 may be seen strung out behind.
This took place in the recent meet of the Cross-Word Association of America. The next cross-word field games will take place shortly after Labor Day.
Meanwhile, what does Mr. Stern intend to do about Miss Marshall's claims? Red-blooded men would like to know. For her part, Miss Marshall takes it in good part—now! There it goes again—two words just alike in one sentence! What am I going to be able to do about that? Questioned today, she—Miss Marshall—said:
"I am waiting patiently. I am in excellent condition, ready to step into the Sunday supplements at a minute's notice. No, there is no truth to the report that I intend engaging Prof. Jimmie DeForest to supervise my preparations. Yes, I train myself.
"My advice to young cross-word puzzlers is to live a clean, straight life, avoid bad companions, and use the dictionary often. Begin, as I did, on the pocket editions; then work up to the 10-pound edition. I can recite the whole dictionary now. by heart, including the appendix. Want to hear me?"
"No, ma'am."
"Tell my public I love books. read incessantly. My husband, Robert Simon, the novelist, calls me a book-worm sometimes, though he too, is fond of books, in fashion.
I don't care to say anything against Mr. Stern—only that I am ready, aye, eager, to meet him again. I have no excuses to make for my defeat before, other than that I broke my thumb on a seven-letter word in the third round. But I didn't mind—after all, it's all a part of the game, a part of the game I love so well."

A few notes: Jimmy DeForest was a trainer who worked with many top boxers, most notably Jack Dempsey, then the world heavyweight champion. Thank goodness Johnson dispelled the notion that Miss Marshall might train with DeForest for her next title fight against Mr. Stern.

Meanwhile, who was Madeleine Marshall? We learn from Johnson's column that she was married to "Robert Simon, the novelist." The New York Times obituaries for Marshall and Simon help fill the gaps. Simon would serve as music critic for The New Yorker from 1925 to 1948, and also wrote librettos for operas and musical comedies. Marshall would find fame as a singing coach and concert pianist, teaching diction at the Juilliard School of Music and writing The Singer's Manual of English Diction in 1953.

I would guess Johnson knew Marshall and Simon from the New York arts world, and they decided to have some fun by treating cruciverbalism like pugilism. Speed solvers of today should take heed: if you don't train properly, you might break your thumb on a seven-letter word!

P.S.: Here's the solution to the championship puzzle, as printed in the Tampa Times. If the version in the Brooklyn Eagle really was William Stern II's grid at the the three-quarter mark, he must have eventually realized his errors at 17-Across (YEN) and 5-Down (AGENT).

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 to the comics pages of one hundred years ago, and the works of cartoonist Clare Briggs (author of the popular "Mr. and Mrs." strip, among many others) were no exception.

We've previously covered Briggs as not just an artist but as a lecturer and a movie producer. So it comes as no surprise that this single panel scene — "The Cross-Word Puzzler's Bridegroom," published in the New York Herald Tribune and syndicated in other newspapers — could be right at home on the stage. Let's conduct a brief analysis of the melodramatic tableau being depicted.

The certificate identifying the obsessive bride as a member of the Cross Word Puzzle Association of America is from a real organization which we first covered in our May 8th entry Much of the crossword's early history was based in New York City, and with Briggs' living in New York and working for the Herald Tribune, it's natural to expect him to be familiar with it. Perhaps he was inspired by the Herald Tribune's own coverage of the association's inaugural convention on May 18th.

A quick scan of the scattered crossword grids exhibit a semblance of grid symmetry. Margaret Petherbridge (soon to be known as Margaret Farrar) is often credited with having standardized rotational symmetry in crosswords. The puzzles that Petherbridge and her fellow editors at the New York World supplied to Simon & Schuster for the first crossword puzzle book a few months earlier showed rotational symmetry, and Briggs seems to have taken note.

We can spot various reference books too: an atlas, a huge tome on the bed, and an even bigger book in the bride's frantic hands. Maybe a dictionary and a thesaurus? Even back then, Roget's Thesaurus was available in the United States for crossword fans to peruse.

As for the weeping bridegroom, he could double for great dramatic actor John Barrymore, whose career was ascending at the time.

Clare Briggs used other distractions in his marital strips (notably husbands messing with shortwave radio sets, seen here and here), so let us all hope that this new couple worked things out before it was too late. Luckily Scrabble was still at least two decades away.

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 to be celebrations of the idea of a book of crosswords, more than of this particular collection.

But they were still new enough that at least some reviewers felt the need to explain the concept of crossword puzzles altogether. In one lengthy review from June 1924, the syndicated columnist Grant Overton explains the puzzle thusly:

What are cross word puzzles? A big white square is divided into maybe 225 little squares. Certain of these little squares are blackened. The white squares remaining are numbered horizontally and vertically. To each number belongs a word, spelling across or down. The pattern of words is so contrived that the spelling runs both ways. Each number is supplied with a definitions—supposed to give you the clue to the word called for. And, of course, the number of white squares until you come to a black square tells you how many letters make the word. Easy? You try a few, yourself!

Overton describes his conversion. He had “not been a cross word puzzle fan,” and went into it skeptically. He seems to have been won over by editor F. Gregory Hartswick's introduction to the book, which he quotes at some length. A section of that introduction:

Solving a cross word puzzle offers numerous enjoyments of which the uninitiated are ignorant. There is the pure esthetic stimulation of looking at the pattern with its neat black and white squares, like a floor in a cathedral or a hotel bathroom; there is the challenge of the definitions, titillating the combative ganglion that lurks in all of us; there is the tantalizing elusiveness of the one little word that will satisfactorily fill a space and give clues to others that we know not of; and there is the thrill of triumph as the right word is found, fitted, and its attendant branches and roots spring into being.

Hartswick's enchantment seemed to be contagious. Back to Overton, in the glow of the puzzle grids:

And then follow the fifty selected cross word puzzles. They burst upon you with a dazzling radiance of black and white symmetries. Each has some gay and weird and sometimes very intricate pattern effect. There are Greek crosses, there's a tetracruciform, one facetiously called the Baby Grand Model, a four-petalled rose, a spotted border... Just to turn the unsolved—and maybe for us, unsolvable—pages is a joy to the bewildered and delighted eye.

The image quality on this scan is not the clearest, but we've included the full review below for those curious.

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 catapulted to the top the best-sellers' list, Publishers Weekly could finally divulge the answer to the mystery.

The May 31 issue of the trade magazine broke the news:

The Cross Word Puzzle Solved
The Plaza Publishing Company Is Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Now that "The Cross Word Puzzle Book," released in April under the imprint of the Plaza Publishing Company, is listed as a best seller, it is possible to present a solution of one of the puzzling mysteries of the book-trade.

For it now develops that the Plaza Publishing Company is a subsidiary owned and controlled by the new firm of Simon & Schuster, Inc., whose entry into this field was briefly chronicled in a previous issue of the Publishers' Weekly. The announcement that Simon & Schuster are the real publishers of "The Cross Word Puzzle Book" was held up until the present in order not to give the impression that the new firm would specialize in novelty books. But so much interest has been aroused by "The Cross Word Puzzle Book” as one of the outstanding current successes, that Simon & Schuster have decided to place it under their own imprint.

The article included photos of the dashing young publishers, revealed as Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, and announced that their fall list would include such highbrow fare as a biography of Joseph Pulitzer. The runaway success of The Cross Word Puzzle Book, despite its "novelty" status, allowed Simon & Schuster to diversify its publishing portfolio in a matter of months.

The publishing plan of Simon & Schuster is to make excursions into all fields of literature, holding to the policy of concentrating intensively on a small list of books discriminatingly selected and aggressively exploited. "The Cross Word Puzzle Book" seems to have fulfilled that promise, for, according to the New York Times, "it is sweeping the country with a whirlwind rush." This seems to be good evidence that Simon & Schuster know a good idea when it strays into their office and know how to put it into book form and how to sell it.

Amusingly enough, the quote from the New York Times is taken from the famously sniffy review of May 4, "Cross Word Puzzles Embalmed Between Covers." (The full quote goes, "Every now and then some game comes along that acts with a peculiar stimulus on the mass mind—perhaps something like catnip on cats—and sweeps across the country with a whirlwind rush...") But all publicity was good publicity for the young Columbia grads, who had caught lightning in a bottle with the crossword craze and could now build a publishing empire on top of it.

Here in 2024, I had the pleasure of appearing on Mignon Fogarty's Grammar Girl podcast, where I talked all about the Crossword Craze project. Welcome, Grammar Girl listeners! If you'd like to receive these dispatches from a century ago in your inbox, hit "subscribe" at the top of the page.

You can enjoy the Grammar Girl episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcatcher of choice. It's also available on YouTube, and a transcript is here.

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 the Cross-Words” laments how the author’s life has been ruined ever since a friend, Diana, took up crossword solving. 

I have always liked to talk to Diana, even when she went about saying ‘every day in every way I’m getting better and better.’ My friendship sustained her babbling about green dragons, east winds and heavenly twins. Now– well, I am afraid we have come to a parting at the cross-words. I am not strong enough (being already weakened by past experiences) to hear about ‘a minced form of the word God,’ ‘divine cedar,’ ‘Siamese coin’ and ‘barrage of the Nile.’

Homans goes on to describe occasions – a beautiful spring day, tea at the club – which Diana ruins by pressing her for answers.

Tea at the club is no longer what it used to be. I liked tea once. You drifted in thinking of nothing in particular. You stirred your tea slowly. You gazed out at the elms in Stuyvesant Square. But that was all before Diana and her friends took to cross-word puzzles.

Unlike Diana, Homans professes to have no interest in crosswords, describing them as “a combination of cross addition, the Einstein theory, and Roget’s ‘Thesaurus.’” She also speculates that their popularity is due to the end of the war, and muses that the puzzles might be a gateway drug to rediscovering other frivolous hobbies, like charades:

Nobody seems to have been curious as to why people are so interested in cross-word puzzles, aside from the fact that the year’s at spring. I blame it on the war. The younger generation at that time was so busy selling Liberty bonds, watching parades and taking part in peace pageants that they had not the time for the leisurely perusal of “St. Nicholas,” such as their parents had when they were young.
But before I continue I wish to warn Diana of charades. It’s been a long time since people wrapped themselves in couch covers and portiers and tried to act. It’s  been so long that now some one could easily discover charades again. They are the next step.

Crosswords infect every part of Diana’s life: they cause her to stay up late Saturday nights, in order to purchase the paper first thing Sunday morning; they leave her and her beau, Tommy Brent, no time for “petting”; they even make her stare at waffles, unconsciously trying to solve them. 

Homans’ resentment of the crossword seems to be more than a matter of personal preference. It is likely that Homans, who would go on to write poetry, cultural commentary and “slice-of-life” pieces for the New Yorker, resented the puzzle’s incursion into New York literary life, and her complaint is an ideological as well as a practical one:

Since the intelligentsia have taken up the game Diana decided she must have a literary bent. Especially as she won 25 cents from Tommy Brent in one game.

She sarcastically proposes that soon poems and novels might start to take on the form of crossword clues. 

THE PROBLEM NOVEL
My 27-14-5-3-2 is pertaining to husband or marriage.
My 29-13-6-7 is herbs dressed with vinegar.
My 28-13-8-7 is triangular.
My 29-1-4 and 9 is a complete change.

The Herald Tribune would continue to play both sides of the crossword craze, publishing crosswords and sponsoring competitions even as their comic strips and columns mocked enthusiasts as irritating or insane. As for Dorothy Homans, it seems her resentment did not go away even as crosswords proved themselves to be more than a fad. In a 1935 letter to the editor in the Saturday Review, Homans argues against opening the Morgan Library to the public and bemoans the state of public libraries. She describes an interaction with a librarian in which she informs him that she “would rather be shot at sunrise than solve a cross-word puzzle,” and compares crossword solvers to homeless, shoeless “down-and-outers” and “communists with mops of hair like black moss.” (Crossword puzzle addicts, she admits, at least “don’t smell as badly.”) She concludes the letter rather horribly:

Open the Morgan Library and who will throng its halls, pushing the gentle scholars away, ruining the silence for readers to whom Shelley, Pope, and Ben Jonson are not dehumanized? The rag-tail and bob-tail. The rabble. The down-and-outers. The feeble-minded (found in all these groups) and the cross-word puzzle addicts. Three threads that when woven together form the pattern of the Depression. Interesting to a historian, perhaps, but not to a bibliophile longing for the gentle peace that is to be found only in woods and libraries.

Perhaps Dorothy could have taken a cue from her friend Diana and learned to embrace the crossword, which was, after all, not going anywhere.

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 should go, until suddenly it dawned on us that here was our everlasting chance to settle that burning question over which there is so much controversy—Are Puzzlers People, or Are They Nuts?"

Those amassed evidently passed the test:

"... not a Nut could we see. To tell the truth they were the brightest looking crowd it has been our good fortune to meet for many a day. They had an alert expression, a keen, intelligent glance, and cheerfulness, contentment and self assurance radiated from them all. Especially did they express good will and expectancy as they faced the platform on which were the presiding officers and the speakers of the evening.

Ruth Hale, founder of the Lucy Stone league and feminist icon — she advocated for women to be able to legally keep their names after marriage — spoke out against bad clues, ones in which it seemed

puzzle makers look up a word in the dictionary, take the very last synonym given, look up that word and again choose the most remote meaning, perhaps even repeating the process a third time, and then gleefully put down the result, saying with vicious pride, "I guess that'll stick em!" 

Then the championship puzzle, which William Stern II solved in "10 minutes 10 and two-fifths seconds," winning, of course, a coveted dictionary. The full puzzle is below.

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 free, and tickets doubled as a program of the festivities. We here at Crossword Craze have the privilege of sharing a new high-resolution scan of one of those tickets from the personal collection of Will Shortz.

Shortz has previously described the provenance of this object in The Ephemera Journal:

I own several copies of the first crossword book, but this one is unique. It’s a presentation copy inscribed by Dick Simon and Max Schuster to Aunt Wixie, whose idea it had been to publish the book. It has various pieces of ephemera tucked inside the covers, including a copy of a letter from Dick to his father thanking him for investing in the fledgling company; the book’s answer key, which had to be mailed away for; an unused ticket to the first crossword convention; and assorted newspaper articles.

By all accounts, the convention was a success. The New York Times printed a short recap the next day:

Joseph E. Austrian was elected President of the Cross Word Puzzle Association of America, an organization formed last night by 300 men and women who met in the Italian Room at the Ambassador. Speeches were made in praise of the mind-developing effect of crossword puzzles by Ruth Hale, Mr. Austrian, Dr. Everett Thompson and others.

Over at the Herald Tribune, a longer round-up covered the ins and outs of the competition (which was won by William A. Stearn) including a clue fact-check from humorist Gelett Burgess.

"Fraud," Yells Skeptic

It was while Mr. Stearn was parading down the aisle with his prize under his arm—a (ten-letter word meaning big book)—that Mr. Burgess raised his voice crying "Fraud!"

"Mr. (eight-letter word meaning presiding officer)" he shouted, "there is an error in the puzzle which invalidates the victory. You give a definition 'Chinese coin,' and the answer is 'Yes,' but I raise that point that that is a fraud because the 'Yen' is a Japanese coin."

That same piece ends with some stats: "Forty-three newspapers use crossword puzzles and there are said to be 100,000 addicts in the country."

Over at the Providence Journal, columnist F.H. Young was dealing with the four-letter word of FOMO.

Most of us out here in the rural regions don't realize what we miss by not living in New York. Life there is so crowded with interest. We would have given anything, for instance, to have been present yesterday at the Cross-Word Puzzle Convention ...

And it is further hoped that the non-cross-worders who attended the convention did not fulfill the press prediction by going away after it was all over, murmuring to themselves "a four-letter word (plural) meaning fruits consisting of a kernel or seed inclosed in a hard woody or leathery shell which does not open when ripe." We guessed this one, which is about the simplest thing that confronts any cross-word puzzler. But it would be rude in the extreme to say it, or even think it, in connection with the students of cross-word puzzles, which, we have been informed, are intensely fascinating.

As a final note, I constructed today's puzzle in the Los Angeles Times—my themeless debut! Solve it online, or on paper in the Times or any paper that syndicates its puzzle.

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 York Herald Tribune.

While its crosstown rival the New York World may have first popularized the puzzle, the Herald Tribune was no slouch in the crossword department, as we've already seen. Every Sunday, their "Weekly Meeting of the Puzzle Makers" featured crossword commentary alongside that week's puzzle. The May 11th edition announced the convention, providing far more details than what Price shared in her column.

Here, the Herald Tribune's puzzle editor gives the news a matter-of-fact treatment. (The editor wasn't named, but it was later revealed to be Albert Buranelli. He was the younger brother of Prosper Buranelli, who collaborated with fellow World editors Margaret Petherbridge and F. Gregory Hartswick on The Cross Word Puzzle Book.) The announcement from the secretary of the convention, Dr. F. Spencer Halsey, is reproduced in full, including the proposed resolutions limiting the kinds of words appearing in crosswords.

That only dictionary words are to be used in the construction of Cross Word Puzzles. No foreign words allowed.
Abbreviations are forbidden, save such as are commonly used in speech, such as A.D., e.g., and so on.
Unfamiliar words, such as obsolete, archaic and technical words, are to be discouraged.
Prefixes and suffixes are forbidden.

The next time the Herald Tribune reported on the convention, the paper did so in much more whimsical fashion, with an article that ran on page 3 of the May 15th edition under the headline "Cross-Word Puzzlers to Hold [10-Letter Word Meaning Meet]." (One might quibble that meet is a less-than-adequate clue for convention, but it fit the headline.)

Despite this ostensibly being a news article, the tone is heavily satirical, complete with absurd non-sequitur crossword clues sprinkled throughout.

A Cross-Word Puzzle Convention is to be held Sunday at the Hotel Ambassador. Enthusiastic followers of tiddley-winks, jackstraws, parchesi, prisoner's base, cops and robbers, and whatever the game is that the kids play on the sidewalks with checkers have not yet announced the dates of their respective conventions.
[1. A word of twelve letters, meaning the part of a pupa-case covering the head. This has nothing to do with anything in particular, but the circumstances seem to demand something of the sort.]

Notable attendees, including Franklin P. Adams and the power couple of Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun, are subject to good-natured ridicule.

Joseph E. Austrian is chairman of the committee in charge of the riot. F. Gregory Hartswick will preside after Mr. Austrian gets through apologizing for the affair. There is a reason for F. Gregory Hartswick's conviction that cross-word puzzles are real, cross-word puzzles are earnest, and all that sort of thing. Brother Hartswick is editor of the Cross Word Puzzle Book, for which some people pay cash on delivery.
[...]
Everett Thompson will make a speech on nothing in the world less than "The Value of Cross-Word Puzzles in Forming the Dictionary Habit." Dr. Thompson is one of those canny lads, too. He is editor of Webster's International Dictionary. Try to puzzle that out.
[...]
Ruth Hale will speak on "Honor Among Cross-Word Fans." Heywood Broun will listen. The advance blurb says that Frank Adams, Neysa McMein, Alice Duer Miller and Montague Glass will be among the idle rich cheering the gladiators forward. Every one will be handed a cross-word puzzle in a sealed envelope on entering. The first solution entitles the solver to enter a championship contest to be held at a future date.

Finally, on May 16th, the tone of the Herald Tribune's coverage changed yet again, with a more high-minded masthead editorial titled "The Word Hunters."

From a childish diversion the cross word puzzle has grown to be an absorbing adult employment. Every Sunday morning grown-ups by the hundreds of thousands ask each other to name a word of six letters meaning "steal" or a word of twelve letters meaning "a peculiar personal characteristic." By the side of many a hearth is heard the busy plying of erasers when a well-laid verbal scheme has gone agley and an entirely new system is made necessary by a wrong start.
[...]
The proceedings of the convention will be much marked and widely noted. There are few reading Americans who do not hope in the perusal of them to pick up some baffling trisyllable for the lack of which they had to leave a puzzle partially solved back in the summer of 1921.

How far the crossword craze had come in the space of a little over a month, with editorialists expounding on the burgeoning social phenomenon.

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 strip Mr. and Mrs.

Clare A. Briggs (1875–1930) was a celebrity cartoonist pioneer with his relatable and humorous scenarios of everyday Americans. He earned early success after the William Randolph Hearst media empire hired him to draw cartoons for Chicago newspapers, including his short-lived 1903-1904 strip A. Piker Clerk, often described as the first daily strip to ever use regular continuity as well as a horizontally-sequenced layout. Briggs' success led him to finish his career with the New York Tribune (later merged as the New York Herald Tribune) where he remained until his premature death after contracting pneumonia during a hospital stay. Briggs drew a number of nationally syndicated strips including When a Feller Needs a Friend, Ain't It a Grand and Glorious Feeling?, The Days of Real Sport, and the aforementioned Mr. and Mrs., which continued for decades by other hands after his death.

Briggs was so successful he augmented his earnings as a lecturer, touring on the vaudeville circuit, and with his own movie studio, producing a series of 1919 comedy shorts for Paramount Pictures. His Mr. and Mrs. strip even had its own radio series on CBS from 1929 to 1931.

Briggs may have still had his cinematic experience on the mind when he created his Movie of a Man newspaper strip series, perhaps imagining each panel as a frame or scene. While the Mr. and Mrs. strip above would be the first of many that Briggs would create during the 1924 crossword craze, this was predated by a Movie of a Man strip from October 1922 depicting a man solving a crossword.

But the earliest example we've found of crosswords in newspaper comics appeared in the previous month, courtesy of cartoonist Fontaine Fox.

Fontaine Talbot Fox, Jr. (1884–1964) was best known for his Toonerville Folks (often titled by newspapers Toonerville Trolley) daily panel, a unique depiction of a trolley in a small town of a large cast of quirky and outlandish characters. Starting in 1913, Toonerville Folks ran nationally until Fox's retirement in 1955. He was able to gain all rights to the panel, a rarity in those days.

Fox did very well financially merchandising books and toys from Toonerville. It was popular enough to have spawned a series of live action comedies in the early 1920s, three 1936 Van Beuren Studios animated cartoons, and a series of over 55 low budget shorts starring Toonerville character Mickey McGuire as played by young star Joe Yule Jr. The series was so successful Yule changed his name to Mickey McGuire. After the series ended and the actor continued using the name, Fox had to go to court to prove that he owned the copyright to Mickey McGuire, leading the actor to change his name one last time to Mickey Rooney.

Toonerville Folks was honored in the 1995 Comic Strip Classics series of U.S. postage stamps, and appeared on PBS as a segment in the 1977 animated shorts collection Simple Gifts. Friz Freleng is said to have partially based the behavior of Looney Tunes character Yosemite Sam on the Toonerville Folks character Terrible-Tempered Mr. Bang. Fox died at the age of 80 in Greenwich in 1964, refusing to pass his panel to another cartoonist.

As a bonus feature, enjoy this very brief 1913 clip of popular newspaper cartoonists drawing in action, including Fox and Briggs at the end.

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 re-orders, last-minute news about its availability, and a list of "Features to Remember" that read like talking points for booksellers.

Those talking points certainly made the hard sell! Here they are, transcribed:

Features to Remember:
(1) At least one hundred hours of entertainment for $1.35.
(2) Pencil and eraser with each book—an excellent talking point.
(3) Only one person can use a book—no lending—and plenty of repeat business: EVERY FAMILY NEEDS SEVERAL COPIES TO KEEP PEACE IN THE HOUSE!
(4) Not a Juvenile—Prominent display means immediate turnover.
(5) Puzzles are All Brand New—fifty of them—and 100 per cent perfect.
(6) Forty Big Newspapers Throughout the Country are Featuring the Puzzles Intensively.
(7) THE CROSS WORD PUZZLE BOOK is out-bridging bridge and out-punging Mah-Jong as a national fad.

Elsewhere, the Boston Globe ran a crossword criticism column alongside its actual puzzle.

In this text, we see an early predecessor of both official outlets like the NYT Daily Wordplay column and the crossword blogs that have played such a major role in the modern crossworld.

To our modern sensibilities, the puzzles of 100 years ago would be considered quite a slog; reading a critical assessment at the time of their publication gives some insight into the hold they had on contemporary solvers.

In this case, the column synthesized feedback from readers (and even a second layer of responses to those responses!). Those early puzzles might be nearly unrecognizable to us, but the aversion to “strange words,” a desire for a “variety of vocabulary,” and a sense of the trade-off between “longer words, having been chosen for their interest” and some rough shorter fill all could come out of a 2024 conversation on Crosscord (the Discord server for crossword fans).

An excerpt, transcribed:

Saturday's puzzle by L. C. Hall, was praised not only for the design, but its limited use of extraordinary words, coupled with very few two and three-letter words. It was a hard design to fill, and solvers must realize, when they think it over, that to get variety of vocabulary means that a few strange words cannot be avoided if the puzzle is to be completed at all. However, to refrain from strange words is one of the fine points in the game, on which the super-puzzle makers pride themselves. Such an achievement would receive an[] accolade from the solvers.
[...]
These solvers are beginning to realize that the difficulties of the makers and a fine spirit of encouragement and patience prevails. And the makers in their turn are doing their best to perfect their work.
—
In last Saturday's commend we quotes W.H.K. of Head tide, Me, as considering the April 23 puzzle unfair in its use of many blind letters. We quite misunderstood his meaning. He meant they made puzzles “more difficult,” but “in love, and war, and puzzledom, all is fair.” He earnestly hopes that the author of that puzzle (Marion Mellus, Newton) won't think he has a yellow streak in him.

Finally, the Globe's column teased an upcoming event, about which we'll hear more in coming weeks.

For any fans that may be in New York on the evening of May 18, we want to tell them they are invited to drop in to a convention of cross word puzzle pilots at the Ambassador Hotel. Two enthusiastic New York puzzle fans, Joseph E. Austrian and Dr F. Spencer Halsey, are its sponsors and it is expected that every phase of the cross word puzzle game will be discussed. Anyone with strong ideas on the subject will not be kept from expressing them.

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 of a convention. The latest to raise its flag upon our horizon is that of the National Committee of Cross Word Puzzlers! These Sunday morning amusements have taken such a hold upon "our national consciousness" that a meeting has been called of 100 "experts" from all districts of this vast continent, to be held here this month, when such notables as Hendrik Van Loon, Gelett Burgess, Alice Duer Miller and Dr. F. Spencer Halsey will discuss the vital questions of whether or not foreign words, abbreviations and slang terms are admissable to the realm of cross words. It's a great age we live in.

Price's column was published on May 6th in the Poughkeepsie Eagle-News. Over the next several days, it appeared in such papers as the Santa-Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, the Albany-Decatur (Ala.) Daily, the Carbondale (Pa.) Daily News, the Muncie (Ind.) Evening Press, and the Portland (Me.) Evening Express. Her column was syndicated in more than a hundred newspapers, so she commanded a national audience of readers curious about New York City goings-on.

We'll have much more to say about the first crossword convention beyond this early preview. Price doesn't mention it, but the convention was scheduled for May 18th, to be held at the Hotel Ambassador in midtown Manhattan. And the group would be known not as the National Committee of Cross Word Puzzlers but the Cross Word Puzzle Association of America. Perhaps they were still working out the name when Price got the news!

The "notables" mentioned by Price include a few names we've already come across. The report on the crossword craze from "The Literary Lobby" in the New York Evening Post of Apr. 26, 1924 gave the names of Hendrik Van Loon, Gelett Burgess, and Alice Duer Miller as literary lights who (along with Franklin P. Adams) gave the crossword "a running start" before the craze began. Van Loon was a best-selling author of books about history, including the popular 1921 children's book The Story of Mankind. Burgess was a humorist best known for light verse like "The Purple Cow" and the Goops books. And Miller was a poet and novelist who was active in the women's suffrage movement.

As for the fourth name mentioned in Price's column, Dr. F. Spencer Halsey, he wasn't a literary celebrity like the others. Rather, he was a New York physician who evidently took a keen interest in crosswords and wanted to help organize the convention. (He died on Aug. 4, 1924, just a few months after the convention was held.) And how would Halsey and the others rule on whether "foreign words, abbreviations and slang terms" should be allowed in crosswords? Just wait and see!

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. Many more takedowns of the crossword would follow in the Grey Lady; the paper would be the last major daily without a puzzle, holding out until 1942. As I write in my forthcoming book, this first salvo deploys tropes the Times would return to: disease, childishness, the need for individual will to overcome collective infirmity.

The crossword craze was an epidemic, "as catching as the 'flu,' and as certain in its conquering power." Something tumorous had wormed its way into the nation's cortex — a "peculiar stimulus on the mass mind ... that gathers in all but the strongest, or should one say the most obstinate, minds." Not very long after the mass death of the Great War and the Spanish flu — events in which many had had to grow up much more quickly than expected, sent off to fight or forced into caretaking roles when family died — the crossword was another of these games pressing "the whole world" into regression: "its second childhood."

The Times would try to be the only adult in the newsroom, and forbade the paper until 1942 from publishing not only crosswords but comics. As we'll see, when it did relent, war was again the backdrop. The Times added a crossword following the horrors of Pearl Harbor. Margaret Farrar, who would become the first puzzle editor at the Times, wrote a memo to Lester Merkel, then the Sunday editor: "I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world. You can’t think of your troubles while solving a cross word."

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 book that ran in Vermont's Burlington Free Press on the first of May.

CROSS-WORD PUZZLE FANS
Here's just what you've been waiting for – a 'grand and glorious' opportunity to do the best puzzles to your heart's content in
THE CROSS-WORD PUZZLE BOOK
Only $1.35. Containing 50 new, never-before-published Cross-Word Puzzles that are wonders! From 'snaps' to heart-breakers. Pencil and eraser attached. The Cross-Word Puzzle Book is out only one month and it's already a "best seller!" Answers FREE with book. Money back if not satisfied. Send check or money order to Dept. G.
PLAZA PUBLISHING CO.
37 West 57th Street New York

While the ad copy said the book had been out "only one month," it was actually more impressive than that: the publication date was April 10, just three weeks earlier. (They placed the same ad in the Buffalo Times and Pittsburgh Post on May 11, so it makes sense that they didn't want to be too precise with the date.) This collection of puzzles "from 'snaps' to heart-breakers" had clearly found an immediate audience.

It helped that newspapers like the Burlington Free Press had already cultivated that audience. While the World and Herald Tribune were battling for crossword supremacy in New York City, the puzzle was making inroads elsewhere. As we previously noted, the Boston Globe was already running three crosswords a week at the time and building up its own puzzling community. The Free Press extended the crossword's reach to another part of New England.

As with the Boston Globe, the puzzle page of the Free Press contained ads for both Simon & Schuster's book and Webster's New International Dictionary from G. & C. Merriam. The Merriam marketers of Springfield, Mass. shrewdly localized their advertising, offering "free pocket maps if you name The Burlington Free Press" when placing your dictionary order.

The weekly crossword running in the Free Press at the time didn't come from the World, the Herald Tribune, or the Globe, but from another source: Bell Syndicate. The syndicate's founder, John Neville Wheeler, had hopped on the crossword craze early, bringing puzzles to newspapers like the Indianapolis Star in February 1924, two months before The Cross Word Puzzle Book kicked off the craze in earnest.

At least early on, Bell Syndicate got creative with the inking of black squares. Here's what the first puzzles in the Indianapolis Star looked like.

By the time the Free Press picked up the Bell Syndicate puzzle on Mar. 13, the crossword just had boring old solid black squares. As the year progressed, other newspapers would start syndicating Bell crosswords, notably the Los Angeles Times.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves! We have lots to look forward to in the month of May 1924, including the very first crossword convention, the first sniffy takedown of crosswords in the New York Times, and an early crossword-themed comic strip. Stay tuned for more from your Crossword Craze correspondents.