Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them - Hardcover

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Adrienne Raphel has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, and Poetry, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, What Was It For, won the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Born in southern New Jersey and raised in northern Vermont, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from Harvard.

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FUN: Arthur Wynne,

Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, and the Origins of the Puzzle

The story of the crossword begins with the birth of Arthur Wynne on June 22, 1891, in Liverpool, England, where his father was the editor of the local Liverpool Mercury. When Wynne was nineteen, he emigrated to Pittsburgh, where he took a job on the Pittsburgh Press and played violin in the city's symphony orchestra. Soon, Wynne moved to New York and joined the staff of the New York World.

The World had launched in New York City in 1860. Each issue cost a penny. In 1864, the paper's editor published forged reports supposedly from President Abraham Lincoln that urged men to join the Union army. Lincoln was furious, the editor was arrested, and the World shut down for several days. The paper limped along printing propaganda for its various owners until 1883, when famed publisher Joseph Pulitzer bought the operation. In an aggressive circulation-boosting campaign, Pulitzer pumped the paper full of pulpy news and yellow journalism, transforming the World into one of the most popular publications in the country and the first in America to reach over one million subscribers daily. Pulitzer hired blockbuster reporters like Nellie Bly, who performed such gonzo stunts as traveling, for the World, around the world in seventy-two days, just to best Phileas Fogg's famous eighty. In 1890, operations moved into a brand-new, eighteen-story, gold-domed skyscraper next to City Hall on Park Row at the bottom tip of Manhattan, making the World's home the world's then-tallest office building. In 1911, the paper launched its weekly color supplement: FUN.

By 1913, Arthur Wynne had been put in charge of FUN. For that year's Christmas edition, set to run on Sunday, December 21, Wynne was in a jam: he had to fill space but had nothing to fill it with. He'd been instructed to add more puzzles to FUN, and Wynne, in desperation, turned his writer's block into a grid, a diamond-shaped interlocking set of squares flanked by clues that ran differently across and down. "FUN's Word-Cross Puzzle" instructed readers, "Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions." The crossword conceit-here are clues, here is a grid, go forth and fill the grid with the answers to these clues-was born.

Wynne's Word-Cross looks like a modern crossword, with obvious differences. It's a diamond, not a square, and rather than black spaces throughout, there's one concentrated blank in the middle, like a doughnut hole. Rather than separating the clues into Across and Down, Wynne listed clues by giving their beginning and ending squares.

Wynne's puzzle doesn't deploy pyrotechnic layers of wordplay. The clues proceed as fairly straightforward definitions; none of them ask the reader to solve a riddle, or decode an acrostic, or undo a pun to arrive at the solution. Ambiguity is on the level of information rather than imagination: "A bird" (DOVE), for example, could have any number of solutions, but this puzzle is looking only for flying animals, not, say, jailbirds or stool pigeons. Most clues are fairly generic. Many of the clues establish a bond between the clue writer and the solver, a wink from Wynne to us: "What we should all be," for example (MORAL), or, "What this puzzle is" (HARD). The puzzle also repeats itself: "A pigeon," like "A bird," is also DOVE. Some require extremely esoteric knowledge-"The fibre of the gomuti palm" (DOH) would likely be impossible for most nonbotanists, particularly since the gomuti is far more common in Indonesia than Manhattan-so filling in the puzzle relies not only on the reader's capacity to get the clues via the definitions alone but on the simultaneous ability to deduce the answer from corresponding letters in the grid.

FUN and the origin myth of Wynne's invention notwithstanding, part of the ingenuity of Wynne's Word-Cross is that it isn't original at all. Wynne's genius wasn't to reinvent the wheel, but to move the needle precisely enough so that his new game would excite but not befuddle solvers. Victorian newspapers and magazines frequently featured word squares that challenged readers to fill in blanks with words that read the same horizontally and vertically; a simple example might be the following:

                O             F              F

                F              O             E

                F              E              D

Wynne freely acknowledged that his word-cross did not come to him sui generis. He'd based the puzzle on similar word puzzles that had been published in children's newspapers in England. The popular children's magazine St. Nicholas had regularly been publishing acrostics and word puzzles since 1873. Its "Riddle Box" featured games such as a "cross-word enigma," a riddle that asks readers to tease out a word from a rhyming poem of cryptic clues. Other magazines had also started to print word-grid games. The September 1904 edition of the People's Home Journal featured a blended square, or five word squares that interlocked at the corners. The blank grid wasn't printed, though, meaning that solvers had to draw the squares for themselves to fill it in. And proto-crosswords weren't only in English. In 1890, Italian journalist Giuseppe Airoldi introduced a four-by-four word game printed with a grid.

But Wynne's crossword was the first that incorporated crossed words directly on the page with blocked-out squares, pushing beyond the natural limitations of the word square and creating a much more flexible, and expandable, game. Wynne took advantage of advances in twentieth-century printing technology that made it easier to print large grids in the newspaper itself. Rather than posing a problem and asking readers to draw their own grids or write the answers elsewhere, Wynne's puzzle provides the empty squares, inviting the reader to engage with the puzzle right in the newspaper. Wynne also introduced black squares into his symmetrical rows and columns, which gave the puzzles clear units of negative space and allowed for more varied grids. If music comes to life in the spaces between the notes, the crossword became the crossword because of the gaps in the puzzle.

Each week, Wynne printed a new puzzle of this word-crossed type in the World. A typographical error two weeks after Wynne's original Word-Cross transposed the title's two words, suggesting that readers "Find the Missing Cross Words," and the following week, the paper presented the puzzle under the heading "Fun's Cross-Word Puzzle." Eventually, the hyphen disappeared, as did the capital letters, and the Cross-Word became the crossword. The trend of disappearing hyphens isn't unique to the crossword; the early twentieth century saw many words that were once hyphenated become either two separate words or closed compounds (to-day, ice-cream, bumble-bee). Cross-Word, like Xerox or Band-Aid, shifted from becoming descriptive of a certain kind of word game in one particular paper to the generic name for the puzzle itself.

Jokes, riddles, comics, rebuses, advertisements, and other layers of...