![]() ![]() They inspired a Broadway hit called Games of 1925 and a hit song called "Crossword Mama, You Puzzle Me." Sales of dictionaries soared, and foot traffic in libraries increased dramatically. Newspaper started adding them to increase circulation. Crossword puzzles became a way of life in the 1920s. ![]() publishing house and the second-largest publisher on earth). The book turned Simon & Schuster into a major publisher. The World's crossword puzzlers flocked to stores to get copies, and by the end of the year more than 300,000 crossword books had been sold. The pair then used all their money to print The Cross Word Puzzle Book. They would pick the newspaper's best crossword puzzles and pay $25 apiece for the rights to publish them in a book. The next day, he and Schuster went to the World's offices and made a deal with the paper's crossword puzzle editors. Lincoln Schuster, told her there were no such books … and then hit on the idea of publishing one himself. Simon, who was trying to break into the publishing business with college chum M. A World subscriber and a cross-word devotee, she asked where she could buy a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter. Simon went to dinner at his Aunt Wixie's house. So for the next 10 years, if you wanted to work on a crossword puzzle, you had to buy the World.Īccording to legend, in 1924 a young Columbia University graduate named Richard L. In fact, no other newspaper wanted any part of them. Crosswords were difficult to print and were plagued with typographical and other errors. ![]() Though the puzzles were popular with readers, they were decidedly unpopular with editors. ![]() When the World tried to drop it a few months later, readers were so hostile that the paper reversed itself and decided to make it a permanent feature of the puzzle page instead. (See if you can solve the World's First Crossword Puzzle)įour weeks after the puzzle first appeared, typesetters at the newspaper inadvertently transposed the words in the title to read "Cross-Word." For some reason, the name stuck - and so did the puzzle. So many people wrote in to praise the puzzle that he put one in the paper the following Sunday and again on the third Sunday. Wynne's puzzle, which he called a "Word-Cross," debuted on Sunday December 21 as planned. It was more challenging, since there were more words to work on. In a word square, all of the words in the square have to read the same horizontally and vertically, like the example below.īut in the new puzzle Wynne came up with, the "across" words were different from the "down" words. One winter afternoon in 1913, while trying to think up new types of games for the newspaper's special Christmas edition, he came up with a way to adapt the "word squares" his grandfather had taught him when he was a boy. Here's the story of how crossword puzzles came to be and why it took over twenty years for The New York Times to convince itself to carry the puzzles.Īrthur Wynne was a writer for the game page of the New York World at the turn of the 19th century. In the 1920s, a crossword puzzle craze swept the nation that drove some people over the edge: a man shot his wife when she wouldn't help him and another man killed himself leaving a suicide note in the form of a crossword puzzle. The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. ![]()
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