1978 Puzzles Up on XWord Info, In 1951 and Almost at the Sunday Puzzle–Only Period, Link to New Bernice Gordon Article, and Most Common Unique Maleska Entries

Great news:  The proofread puzzles from 1978 are now up on XWord Info, thanks to Jim Horne!  The puzzles from August 10 through November 5 are missing because of a newspaper strike.

It's been a very busy week on both the litzing and proofreading fronts!  On Saturday morning, Alex Vratsanos sent in 7 puzzles, which were followed that afternoon by 10 proofread puzzles from Todd Gross.  Early Sunday morning, Todd sent in 10 more proofread puzzles, and that afternoon, Lynn Feigenbaum sent 7 litzed puzzles, which were followed by 14 from Mark Diehl that night.  Monday morning, Todd sent in 11 more proofread puzzles.  Then that afternoon, Nancy Kavanaugh sent a mega-batch of 42 puzzles, putting us over 15,200 on the litzing thermometer and her own total at more than 1,100—congratulations, Nancy!  Just 9 minutes later, 7 more puzzles came in from Barry Haldiman.  And when I woke up Wednesday morning, I found 7 puzzles sent in late Tuesday night by Mike Buckley, 7 early Wednesday from Lynn, and 10 more proofread puzzles from Todd—a great start to the day!  Thursday morning Todd sent in another 10 proofread puzzles, then 11 more that afternoon—way to go, Todd!  That night, Todd McClary sent in 7 litzed puzzles.  Early Friday morning, Barry sent 7 more puzzles.  Then, within the space of one hour, 7 more came in from Denny Baker, another 7 from Lynn, and 10 more proofread puzzles from Todd!  Thanks so much again, everyone—we're now at 15,282 on the litzing thermometer and well into the 1977 proofreading!

We're also now in a new year:  1951!  One of the most noteworthy events of that year was the introduction of the classic TV sitcom series I Love Lucy, which, according to Wikipedia, was the most watched show in the United States for four of its six seasons.  Here's a collage of images from the show:

Image courtesy of thebluegrassspecial.com

Only one more packet containing daily puzzles remains to be sent out, so we're about to enter the Sunday puzzle phase of litzing, and all future packets will just contain those.  Although the first daily puzzle appeared on September 11, 1950, for various reasons the dailies from then through the first week of August 1951 were litzed, along with many of the Sunday puzzles during that time as well.  Since litzing Sunday puzzles takes longer, the packets will usually contain four Sunday puzzles (instead of six dailies and one Sunday).

A wonderful new article on Bernice Gordon appeared in this week's Philadelphia Inquirer!  If you didn't already see it on Cruciverb-l, click here to read it.

Now that almost all the Maleska-edited puzzles have been posted on XWord Info, I decided to take another look at the "Most popular answers found only in pre-Shortzian puzzles" page.  I naturally expected that every entry on this list would be a short-but-uncommon entry that Maleska allowed but Shortz doesn't (such as INEE).  I was thus very surprised to see that a fair number of these entries that appeared six or more times under Maleska but have yet to appear in a Shortz-era puzzle are common words, phrases, and names that are more than eight letters long!  Here are the ones that particularly stood out to me, followed by the number of Maleska puzzles they appeared in:

ELEMENTAL (9)
WELLINGTON (8)
ALEXANDRIA (7)
SHRINKING VIOLET (7)
THE CONSTITUTION (7)
AUSTRALIAN CRAWL (6)
CARNATION (6)
CRANBERRY (6)
FLIBBERTIGIBBET (6)
FLYING DOWN TO RIO (6)
GRANDSTAND PLAYS (6)
HUCKLEBERRY FINN (6)
KICK UP ONE'S HEELS (6)
LILY OF THE VALLEY (6)
LONGFELLOW (6)
MAIN STREET (6)
NO STONE UNTURNED (6)
RAGAMUFFIN (6)
ROCK OF GIBRALTAR (6)
RUSSIAN DRESSING (6)
SHORT-ORDER (6)
SQUARE THE CIRCLE (6)
THE BILL OF RIGHTS (6)
VANESSA REDGRAVE (6)

I find it fascinating that each of these entries appeared in so many Maleska puzzles!  I wonder if the reason why these particular entries appeared so often is that Maleska, who didn't have access to databases of previously published crosswords, unknowingly repeated common themes every couple of years.  LILY OF THE VALLEY, for example, appeared in four puzzles over a three-year period with the exact same theme (plants).  There aren't very many common grid-spanning plant names, so it makes sense that, since plants were clearly a popular theme, LILY OF THE VALLEY would appear multiple times.  This doesn't explain, though, why not a single New York Times crossword published after 1985 contains this entry (or any of the other entries in the aforementioned list).  I look forward to seeing what other long entries frequented yet were unique to pre-Shortzian puzzle grids when the Weng and Farrar puzzles are eventually posted!