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Michael Sharp, who posts often savage reviews of every daily Times crossword under the pseudonym Rex Parker - but she never talks to him about his obsession or his adopted persona as the curmudgeonly scold whom every constructor resents but many secretly want to please.
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Raphel includes a few quotes from the blog of Prof. But no one now alive seems quite as, well, alive. Or consider the romantic, elegiac chapter in which Raphel describes how Vladimir Nabokov maintained his connection to his wife, Vera, then a patient in a sanitarium, by sending her love notes filled with crosswords to solve, revealing his devotion letter by letter. Raphel relates how Ruth von Phul, that first tournament champion, eventually set puzzles aside to become a world-renowned scholar, enamored of James Joyce’s wordplay. But none of these people seem as vivid as their long-dead predecessors. We meet many constructors and their artful creations, and we visit the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, founded by Shortz and held each spring in Stamford, Conn. Raphel profiles some of the pastime’s modern titans, including the reigning monarch Will Shortz, current Times puzzle editor (and NPR “puzzlemaster”). It is in the modern era that this book loses its lapidary elegance. Raphel describes the delight of the unnamed reporter, disabused of the assumption that “someone who is freakishly good at crosswords will of course be male, be socially awkward and have a face made for radio.” I feel seen.
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Raphel starts her book with the bold thesis “It’s hard to imagine modern life without the crossword” and the closest she comes to proving it is during those early decades, when crosswords were the basis for comic strips - “Cross Word Cal,” by Ernie Bushmiller (who went on to create “Nancy,” itself a bit of a puzzle) - murder mysteries, even a 1925 Disney short, “Alice Solves the Puzzle.” In April 1925 the new magazine The New Yorker profiled a comely 20-year-old Wellesley dropout named Ruth von Phul, the winner of the inaugural Herald Tribune National All Comers Cross Word Puzzle Tournament.
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Wynne may have birthed it, but Petherbridge raised it. As such, she became the true parent of the crossword. It was Petherbridge who established the essential elements of modern crosswords: the rigorous proofreading, the separate lists of Across and Down clues, the avoidance of “unchecked boxes,” or squares that were only part of a single word. … Placing her left hand on a dictionary and raising her right, Petherbridge vowed to take up the crossword.” Suddenly she understood why “what had seemed like a major nuisance could be her chance to make her mark. At first Petherbridge, like The Times, thought it a diversion beneath her talents: a snobbery that ended when she tried to solve one herself. Wynne became overwhelmed with the demand for more and better puzzles, and eventually foisted the whole thing off onto his secretary, Margaret Petherbridge, a refined graduate of Smith College. The paper may have come to regret that, as the crossword instantly became the most popular feature in FUN, if not the entire World. At the end of this diverting, informative and discursive book, her love for crosswords is clear, but her reasons - despite a determined effort on her part to explain them - remain, in the end, a puzzle of their own. How and why this “craze” arose and persisted, and how The New York Times came to not only change its institutional opinion but become the epicenter of American crossword culture, is the story told by Adrienne Raphel in her cultural and personal history of crosswords and the “puzzling people who can’t live without them,” of which she is clearly one. In a 1924 editorial headlined “A Familiar Form of Madness,” this newspaper expressed its disdain for that vulgar new entertainment, that lowly diversion for idle minds, that pointless display of erudition known as the “cross-word”: “Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong sets, about the same persons now are committing the same sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letter of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex.” A year later, this Olympian condescension had gotten a little desperate: “The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten.”