In 1925, the Times clucked that “the craze is evidently dying out, and in a few months it will be forgotten.” Instead, the rage for crossword puzzles continued full blast into, through and past the Great Depression. Incredibly, in more than 70 years, those puzzles have been overseen by only four editors - Margaret Farrar, Will Weng, Eugene Maleska and, since 1993, Will Shortz. Nonetheless, the New York Times crossword puzzles, which started running in 1942, are now the most prestigious and challenging distributed in American newspapers, including the U-T, in which they repose daily. … (Solvers) get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development.” This is not a game at all, and it can hardly be called a sport. In 1924, The New York Times lamented the “sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words, the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. Lincoln Schuster, and the publishing company of Simon & Schuster began life. Instead, the book sold 40,000 copies right off. In 1924, in an era of mah-jongg, goldfish swallowing, flagpole-sitting and telephone-booth stuffing, two New Yorkers published 3,000 copies of a book of 50 crossword puzzles titled “The Cross Word Puzzle Book.” The two men chose the imprint “The Plaza Publishing Company” (Plaza was their telephone exchange) in order to deflect the unfavorable feedback they were anticipating. No surprise, then, that Wynne christened his creation word-cross.įour weeks later, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently switched the two halves of word-cross and dropped the hyphen, and - presto! change-o! - the crossword puzzle was born. He modeled the puzzle after the traditional British word square, also called magic square, a group of words whose letters are arranged so that they read the same horizontally and vertically. 21, 1913, Wynne’s poser appeared in the Sunday edition of the World, radiating into a diamond and containing no black squares. Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool and games section editor of the New York World newspaper. The very first crossword puzzle was concocted by one Arthur S. Welcome to a cruciverbalistic centennial.