A surreptitious crossword addict, he’d taken to buying the rival New York Herald Tribune in secret to devour its puzzle. On December 18, 1941, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of the Times, sent a memo to its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger: “We ought to proceed with the puzzle, especially in view of the fact it is possible there will now be bleak blackout hours-or if not that then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or other.” Sulzberger hardly needed to be convinced.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, the Japanese Navy Air Service launched its military strike against the U.S. By 1941, the Times was the last major metropolitan daily news- paper in America that didn’t offer a crossword puzzle. The puzzle had gone mainstream the crossword had settled from its mad- cap youth into a comfortable position as a staple ritual of the leisure class.
The craze - the fad - stage has passed, but there are still people numbering into the millions who look for their daily cross- word puzzle as regularly as for the weather predictions, and who would be sorely disappointed should the supply be cut off.” Tingley’s argument was hardly unbiased, but he also was on to something. Tingley of Port Chester, New York, writes, “From the viewpoint of one who has constructed and published more than 2,000 of these mental teasers, and is still making them at the rate of seven a week, I can assure you that there is little warrant for your editorial assumption that their end is near. In a letter to the editor from Friday, February 1, 1930, the inaugural date of the Times of London’s crossword puzzle, a Richard H. Readers assured the Times that the crossword was still highly relevant. The craze evidently is dying out fast and in a few months it will be forgotten.” By 1929, the Times was still trying to quash the crossword: “The cross-word puzzle, it seems, has gone the way of all fads,” claimed an article titled “All About the Insidious Game of Anagrams.” In March 1925, the paper proclaimed, “Fortunately, the question of whether the puzzles are beneficial or harmful is in no urgent need of an answer. Over the next several years, the Times persisted in declaring the crossword dead. “Scarcely recovered from the form of temporary madness that made so many people pay enormous prices for mahjong sets,” the Times reported, “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.”Īlthough nearly every major metropolitan newspaper had embraced the crossword by the mid-1920s, the Times staunchly refused. The second, “A Familiar Form of Madness,” painted a slightly different form of economic psychological danger. The first described the Bolshevist Russian concept of “economic espionage,” or the knowledge at any time in one’s life of precepts other than those espoused by the Communist Party. On November 7, 1924, seven months after Simon & Schuster had published its first crossword collection, the New York Times ran two editorial columns side by side.
While The New York Times is now the behemoth for puzzle enthusiasts, Raphel explains why it took the paper decades, and a global crisis, to finally publish one. The following is an excerpt from Adrienne Raphel’s new book “Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them.” When the crossword puzzle first appeared in an American newspaper in 1913, hysteria followed, and it became a cultural force that still thrives today.
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