I have a collection of NY Times puzzles I inherited from my mother-in-law which is edited by Margaret Farrar and is from the early 1960s. It is also old-style with obscure answers. That’s why people back then depended on Crossword Puzzle dictionaries which are not really needed with modern puzzles.
People have been recommending New York Times crosswords, but if you get yourself a book of those, make sure they’re from the Will Shortz era.
Good point. But it’s hard today to find anything not by him, since he replaced Eugene Maleska in 1993. I definitely prefer Shortz, though.
I have a letter from Maleska when I pointed out an error in a Times puzzle - softwear, not ware, and it wasn’t a pun or joke answer. He seemed a bit of a putz. Stanley Newman had a book on crosswords with great hate for Maleska.
Shortz hosted a crossword puzzle tourney I went to. He seemed like a really nice guy. And I was getting Games when he was in charge. The crossword world is much improved thanks to him.
That shouldn’t be too hard. He’s had the gig since 1993. Also, I understand from his wikipedia page that he edits a twice-a-year word puzzle magazine, Will Shortz’ WordPlay for PennyPress.
On a semi-related note, recently, I was going through the trunk o’ personal belongings that I stored in my parents’ garage when I joined the Navy in 1980, and perforce had to reclaim in 2016 when Dad passed away, and we had to sell the house. In among the treasures was a 1977 copy of a Dell puzzle magazine that had only had a couple of puzzles filled out.
It was a real walk down memory lane occupying myself with those.
PennyPress now has the Dell line. Their content seems to be not seriously diminished in quality, but I hate, Hate, HATE the quality of the paper and binding.
he also had time for a murder mystery on hallmarks mysterychannel reviews were mixed tho :a puzzle to die for reviews - Search
Stephen Sondheim has authored several crossword puzzles, currently out of print. If you can find one, good luck!
Then you might have seen the couple of articles I wrote for Games. I had to look it up to realize how long ago it was. The big one was in the November 1982 issue, a piece about a Depression-era newspaper rebus contest that attracted 2 million entries.
What really pleased me was that Shortz said that he had always wanted to write about it but never pulled it together.
Here’s some staggering numbers. Back in 1982, the Depression was 50 years earlier, or as close as Woodstock is to us today. 1982 was also exactly halfway between the end of WWII and today. As you age, life turns into history. That’s why there are no history prodigies.
Cool! I don’t think I read it because that was a year after my daughter was born and I was a bit too busy for puzzles. I was reading it by 1986 since that was where I found out about the Merriam Webster tourney at NYU which I went to.
Lost money several times on unfulfilled subscriptions to that magazine.
I had some from the mid-80s I got from the contest I mentioned. The most interesting thing when I finally got around to doing them was that they had Sudoku puzzles long before anyone in Japan had ever heard of them. I knew they were invented here, but it was interesting to see early ones. Not called Sudoku, of course.
My sister still occasionally finds Dell puzzles (guess they’re actually PennyPress) at the local market, but they’re hard to find and too easy for my taste.
I had books of Will Shortz’s that I loved.