Wall Street Journal review
Benjamin Tausig
Dear friends,
With apologies for the weekend interruption, I just wanted to pas on this wonderful review of my new crossword history book in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. Enjoy!
Ben
> http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303393804579308483935108714
> Bookshelf
> Book Review: 'The Curious History of the Crossword' by Ben Tausig
> A cultural study of crosswords interspersed with specimens from their 100-year history.
> By
> Michael Sharp
> Jan. 24, 2014 5:23 p.m. ET
>
> Each crossword puzzle is, in however small a way, an assertion about what counts as knowledge. It delineates a community, a "we," including some people and excluding others by virtue of the spheres of knowledge it addresses and the argots it wields. So while the crossword puzzle is a diversion from the so-called real world—a chance to forget your daily cares, exercise your brain, pass the time on the subway—it is also deeply implicated in that same world, wading into matters that define and divide us with every 15-by-15 grid.
>
> The Curious History of the Crossword
>
> By Ben Tausig
> Race Point, 192 pages, $17.99
>
> A 1915 puzzle from the New York World, which two years earlier published the first crossword. See clues below—answers run diagonally—and solution grid below.1-12 To shove. 2-7 A boy's name. 3-8 To plant seed. 4-9 A wild animal's home. 5-10 A verb. 6-21 A county in Pennsylvania. 17-13 An adverb. 13-20 One who votes. 15-22 A young child. 19-24 Fog. 23-26 A ruler of a kingdom. 25-29 An exclamation of regret. 11-12 An exclamation of surprise. 9-10 Denial. 13-3 Ornaments. 15-4 It precedes manhood. 8-5 Married. 19-14 A companion. 23-16 A country in Asia. 25-17 Affirms. 27-34 An apartment. 28-26 Part of your head. 6-2 It often follows faith. 27-30 Charge for professional services. Race Point Publishing
>
> This tension between the puzzle-as-fun and the puzzle-as-politics is captured beautifully in Ben Tausig's "The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles From Then and Now," which commemorates the puzzle's centenary with specimens from throughout the past 100 years and thematic chapters tracing the puzzle's history. Part puzzle book, part incisive cultural analysis, "The Curious History of the Crossword" is betwixt and between down to its very design. The artificially yellowed paper of the cover and puzzle pages, the Holmesian title, the cover image of the first-ever published crossword—with FUN (the name of the section of the New York World where it appeared in 1913) written across the top—all situate the book squarely in a quaint, familiar, apolitical world. Mr. Tausig, however, challenges this image by showing how the crossword's evolution reflects shifts in social attitudes, in standards of taste and even (with the advent of digital delivery) in the economy. In his hands, the crossword puzzle's history appears not just venerable but contentious, vibrant and (most important) nowhere near over.
>
> One of the things you'll notice right away about the older puzzles—those from the first couple of decades—is how undoable they are. I can solve a Monday New York Times crossword in under three minutes, but I couldn't even finish the oldest crosswords printed here. Answers tend to be short, clues vague and allowance for arcana broad. Clues and answers are sometimes different parts of speech. Sometimes the clue contains the answer, or the bulk of the answer, within it (e.g., "Sultan's wife" cluing SULTANA, "One who steers" cluing STEERER, etc.). Sometimes the grids are misnumbered, adding an extra level of difficulty.
>
> These early puzzles abound in two-letter words and unchecked squares—ones clued only across or down rather than in both directions—things you'd almost never find in a modern crossword puzzle (thanks largely to Margaret Farrar's pioneering editorship at the New York Times, starting in the 1940s). It's hard to believe that the crossword would have survived if it had continued looking much as it did in the 1910s. Mr. Tausig reminds us that however FUN puzzles may be, they thrive today only because their creators and editors have taken them seriously—creating standards and conventions, raising the quality of editorial oversight, and constantly thinking of new ways to make them both entertaining and culturally relevant.
>
> This issue of cultural relevance was at the heart of the last century's great crossword-puzzle conflict, which saw an old guard (most notably then New York Times crossword editor Eugene T. Maleska) challenged in the 1970s and '80s by a so-called New Wave of constructors and editors, who saw mainstream crosswords as increasingly out of touch. Maleska appears as the lone Bad Guy in Mr. Tausig's book, a crusty pedant who found the names of obscure villages and taxonomic minutiae edifying and whose refusal to admit most modern popular culture terms, brand names and slang phrases into the grid kept the New York Times crossword in a state of cultural sclerosis.
>
> Answer Key Race Point Publishing
>
> Mr. Tausig credits the New Wave, led by Stan Newman (in his self-published Crossworder's OWN Newsletter) and Will Shortz (then at Games magazine), with breathing life into a moribund form. With wordplay, humor and contemporary references, as well as a serious de-emphasis of "crosswordese"—three- and four-letter obscurities such as ANOA (an Indonesian ox) and UNAU (a two-toed Central American sloth)—the New Wave sought to turn the crossword from a rather bleak test of knowledge and vocabulary into a lively, entertaining pastime more in tune with the tastes and experiences of modern solvers. Brand names, long shunned by traditional crossword editors, found favor with the New Wave, and the cluing of ordinary words became more varied and playful in their hands as well. Why go with the literal "Run away to wed" as a clue for ELOPE, they reasoned, when you could go with something snappy like, say, "Waive one's rites?" or "Take the honey and run?" After Maleska's death in 1993, Mr. Shortz took his place at the helm of the New York Times crossword, and though some longtime solvers grumbled, the apotheosis of the New Wave was complete.
>
> At the very moment that Mr. Shortz was taking over at the Times, the Internet was just emerging into popular consciousness. The Digital Age doesn't just open up a vast new fund of answers (words like E-FILE or MEME or, in one puzzle I recently solved, something called E-MAIL APNEA); it also provides, for the first time, a challenge to the puzzle-publishing infrastructure itself. It is now possible to take your product straight to the people, circumventing the traditional newspaper puzzle market entirely. Mr. Tausig, himself an independent constructor, editor and publisher, covers this burgeoning world with a geeky and infectious enthusiasm, hyping the advantages of digital-delivery independents—their nimbleness, their creativity, their more liberal attitude toward sex. "The Curious History" contains a raft of independently produced puzzles from veteran constructors like Brendan Emmett Quigley, Matt Gaffney and Liz Gorski, all of whom have published extensively in newspapers but now operate thriving crossword sites of their own. As Mr. Tausig pointedly notes: "We are well beyond the point when the New York Times could claim to be the only game in town."
>
> The question of economics—of who owns and makes money off the crossword puzzle—is the subject of the book's last chapter, which is also its fiercest. Mr. Tausig sheds light on the economic realities of the traditional crossword-publishing world, where constructors are generally paid paltry sums, even by the most prestigious outlets. As Mr. Tausig notes, there is a "lucrative secondary market" for the newspaper-puzzle publishers, the fruits of which never find their way to constructors.
>
> The top-paying mainstream publisher is the New York Times, and its rate is a measly $300 for a Monday-Saturday puzzle ($1,000 for a Sunday). "There is no other creative industry," Mr. Tausig writes, "where content providers would agree to sacrifice so much of their potential earnings." Calling the dead-tree puzzle-publishing world "fatally unequal," Mr. Tausig discusses the more equitable profit-sharing system that he has instituted as editor/publisher of the American Values Club puzzle and stresses the value to constructors of owning, or at least being paid fairly for, their work.
>
> Mr. Tausig can seem a bit over-enamored of hipness, a little beholden to whatever's happening now. For instance, he claims to prefer the slangy verbal shrug MEH to the straightforward MET as a crossword answer. I have trouble seeing how a rational person could hold this opinion, if only because of the seemingly infinite possibilities for cluing a word like MET (e.g., "Came together," "José Reyes, once," "N.Y.C. opera house, with 'the' "). It's only a straightforward answer if you make it so. But for the most part Mr. Tausig's opinions are judicious and convincing. While the book is occasionally contentious—Mr. Tausig in one chapter considers why women today seem "vastly underrepresented" in the crossword world—what comes across most strongly is his deep understanding and love for the craft of crossword puzzles. His insightful and, ultimately, optimistic book gives solvers of all skill levels great puzzles to solve and provocative issues to ponder.
>
> —Mr. Sharp teaches English at Binghamton University and writes
> the blog "Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle."