Despite the summer heat, we're continuing to make steady progress on the litzing front! Friday night, Mark Diehl started off the week with 14 puzzles and put us at exactly 10,300 on the litzing thermometer! Sunday morning, Denny Baker sent in 7 puzzles, and then on Tuesday, Tom Pepper sent in another 7. Mark wound up the week with a mega-batch of 28 puzzles on Wednesday! And on the proofreading front, Todd Gross sent in 21 puzzles. Thanks so much, everybody!
After the metapuzzle contest was over, I received an e-mail from
New York Times constructor Peter Abide. Peter mentioned that Kenneth Haxton, a musician, writer, and pre-Shortzian constructor who also published one puzzle in the
Times during the Shortz era, had lived in Peter's hometown in Mississippi. To Peter's knowledge, he and Haxton are the only Mississippians to have had their crosswords published in
The New York Times. Peter directed me to a fascinating Web page about Kenneth Haxton's life and work. To read the
Kenneth Haxton biography and interview, click
here or on the
Pre-Shortzian Constructors tab above. Thanks again, Peter!
I've long been seeking one of Maleska's famous rejection letters to post on this blog. Arthur Schulman, whose interview is currently third from the top on the
Pre-Shortzian Constructor Interviews page, generously offered to send along some correspondence he had with Maleska back in 1977, which happened to include a Sunday puzzle rejection. At first I was most excited about the rejection letter; I soon discovered, however, that the discussion between Arthur and Gene about the crossword puzzle scene at that time was far more interesting!
I find it fascinating that crossword solvers' attitudes have changed so much over the years—at first, solvers were leery of new, twisty gimmicks; nowadays, many are much more focused on the quality of the nonthematic fill and clues. This attitude shift seems to have been an outgrowth of the revolutionary creativity "new wave" constructors and editors brought to crossword puzzles. With the place of innovative, ingenious puzzles now assured, constructors, editors, and solvers have been able to turn their attention to perfecting nonthematic fill. The so-called war on nonthematic fill has been bolstered, if not led, by crossword bloggers as well. After you read the correspondence below, you may want to check out (or reread)
Tyler Hinman's "The War on Fill," an excellent piece written more than 30 years later about the attitudes of many modern solvers. Whether or not these attitudes represent majority opinion is unclear—I suspect that plenty of people would rather deal with a few less-than-stellar, or even downright bad, entries in an otherwise stunning puzzle than spend their time on a solidly filled construction with a more ho-hum theme. Casual solvers can overlook or forgive a lot if they love a puzzle's gimmick, but if they're bored, they lose interest; serious or competitive solvers, on the other hand, may feel quite the opposite. Ultimately, the best puzzles combine terrific themes with sparkling—or at least solid and fair—fill.
Without further ado, here is the correspondence:
Over Jordan
Wareham, Mass, 02571
Oct. 15, 1977
Dear Arthur,
Times
change! As soon as I received your “UP”
puzzle, I farmed it out to three test-solvers in the hope that the response
would be favorable. However, all three
turned thumbs down. One summed it up by
saying: “A feat for the constructor, but
a bore for the solver!” After carefully
examining your puzzle, I must admit that this tour de force does not meet the
demands of my present fan mail.
Incidentally, the
reaction to “Change of Pace” was negative.
We are definitely in a different era!
Have you ever
tried a quotation puzzle? I’m looking
for a good one. Take a look at my
S&S Crossword Book of Quotations at your bookstore.
May I use your
puzzle in the Farrar-Maleska books?
All best,
Gene
19 October 1977
Dear Gene,
I appreciate your
frank note, but feel obliged to reply.
I wouldn’t bother
with Sunday puzzle constructions unless I thought they were publishable. Obviously you and your three “test-solvers”
don’t share my high estimation of my UP-puzzle.
Equally obviously, you as the Editor have the right and responsibility
to set the tone of and standards for the puzzles you publish. Still, the following points should be borne
in mind.
(1) The more densely thematic a puzzle, the more
difficult its construction. It is easy
to put together a puzzle with only a few long entries relating to its central
theme. If construction standards were
thrown out the window—if, e.g., unkeyed letters and asymmetry were
permitted—puzzles could be made more thematic, doubtless with greater
“interest” to the solver, but at a cost I doubt you’d be willing to pay. During Will Weng’s reign, construction
standards were sacrificed to Weng’s idiosyncratically horrendous sense of humor.
The best constructors were repelled, and we still are suffering from his
taste in themes and definitions.
(2) One
can be too sensitive to letters of criticism from solvers. Only a tiny percentage of solvers would think
of writing letters to The Puzzle Editor, and these are almost certainly not a
random sample of typical solvers. It
seems to me that the Times should cultivate taste for good crosswords of
several kinds, rather than pander to the lowest common denominator among its
solvers. (Here in Charlottesville, the
local newspaper recently was attacked by many letters to The Editor for
switching from the mindless 13x13 syndicated puzzles to those edited by M.
Farrar.)
(3) A related point to (2). If The NATION, HARPER’S, The ATLANTIC, and
NEW YORK Magazine polled its readers, I’m sure that a large majority would
prefer American-style puzzles to the British-style puzzles they now
publish. Yet I hope you’ll agree that
these outlets would be making a mistake if they responded to the majoritarian
view. It is also almost certainly true
that, as a result of their efforts, the “market” for British-style puzzles is
much larger than it was before.
(4) When I submitted my CHANGE-OF-PACE puzzle, it
was meant merely as a sample of the genre, and I admit to have been astonished
that you published it so readily. Far
better constructions of its type are possible.
What I fail utterly to understand is how or why reaction to this particular
example should determine its future. The
puzzle was unthematic. Its potential, it
seems to me, lies more as an occasional substitute for The Times’ dailies than
for its Sunday puzzles. What I hoped
would be clear from CHANGE-OF-PACE was that new words and new word-combinations
are made possible with a construction in which word boundaries are marked by
bars instead of by black boxes. It thus
gives constructors more flexibility and thereby provides solvers with greater
interest than could be met by standard black-box constructions.
(5) I would be surprised if many solvers shared
the view of your test-solver that my up-puzzle was boring. It would be helpful to know what bores and
what interests this solver; I’m sure our tastes differ. Be that as it may, a puzzle is a
problem-solving exercise. The interest
in my up-puzzle is that, even when the solver has learned that an entry is
almost certain to contain the word UP, he still has to figure out what the
entry is. It is seldom obvious, since
many entries are idioms.
(6) Under Margaret Farrar’s editorship, only four
of my puzzles were initially rejected.
One contained the word LEWD, which Margaret felt too risqué; one LIPOMA,
which was thought to remind solver shut-ins of their plight, apparently by
remote association; and one ALEXANDER DUBCEK, which would have served to remind
readers of the “bad news” they got enough of on the first page of The
Times. The LEWD and LIPOMA puzzles were
easy to modify, and Margaret finally published them in The Times. The A.D. puzzle was published in one of the
Series M.F. edited at the time. The
only puzzle I have ever submitted which did not see the light of day
contained a spelling error (EAST “LYNN”), my fault obviously, and one that
could not be rectified. I say all this
because I think my puzzles are pretty good, and because I think that much of
what The Times has published in recent years (largely under Weng’s editorship)
has been decidedly second-rate. I
welcome your comments here.
I would not wish
to be misunderstood. You are one of the
best constructors the U.S. has known, and I am delighted that you are editing
puzzles for The Times, a job for which you clearly have great skill and
talent. I hope that the foregoing
remarks will be taken in the light of this high esteem.
Best regards,
Arthur
P.S. Go ahead and use
the UP-puzzle in a book, if you wish.
But let me know how much you’ll pay.
10/26/77
Dear Arthur,
Thanks for taking
the time to write me such a long letter.
I wish I had the hours to reply in full. All I can say now is that I will carefully
consider your advice.
An excellent
British-style puzzle will appear on Dec. 4. I do hope I get an avalanche of “More!”
letters because I like that type of puzzle myself. But the straight P.&A. fans are a
vociferous bunch who resist change. Of course,
I’ll overrule them if the rest of the fans give me the green signal.
Times
daily puzzle fans are even more conservative.
Also, I wonder if you know that the dailies are syndicated in 35
newspapers from California to Florida and Maine. My mail indicates that the vast majority are
delighted with the present daily puzzles.
Would you rock such a boat if you were editor? How many “subway solvers” would immediately
turn away if they were presented with bars instead of those familiar,
comfortable block squares? Let the mags
experiment. Their clientele is far
different from mine.
Yes, Will Weng
published some second-rate puzzles. He
also pioneered in giving fans new twists.
The strange thing is that a lot of them are gung-ho for such stuff. The Easter puzzle by Hansen, in which fans
were required to draw eggs, caused a flood of favorable mail and only
two on the negative side. The same thing
occurred when I published Maura Jacobson’s NOT SO SYMBOL AS π in which the defs were symbols like ✓. ✓ for SEPARATE CHECKS.
Times do change, Arthur, whether we veterans like it or not.
As for payment in the Farrar-Maleska
series, I frankly don’t know. Margaret
handles that end of the deal. I imagine
it’s about half of what the Times pays.
As soon as I hear from her, I’ll let you know.
All best,
Gene
P.S. Thanks so much for your kind words re my own
puzzles!
Thanks again, Arthur, for sending this piece along and allowing me to post it! Thoughts, anyone?
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