The Craze
For about eighteen months, beginning in the spring of 1924, a large part of the English-speaking world lost its mind over a word game. The people living through it said so at the time, at length, in print, usually in capital letters.
A book two men were embarrassed to publish
Richard Simon and Max Schuster had been in business three months when, the story goes, Simon's aunt mentioned she wished someone would publish a book of crosswords. They did - fifty of them, gathered from the New York World and edited by Margaret Petherbridge with Prosper Buranelli and F. Gregory Hartswick - and then hid behind an invented imprint, the Plaza Publishing Company, named after their telephone exchange. A serious publishing house didn't want its name on a puzzle book.
They printed 3,600 copies. It sold out immediately, went through printing after printing, and passed a hundred thousand. Two more collections followed the same year.
The measure of what happened next: in both 1924 and 1925 the crossword books were among the year's ten best-selling works of non-fiction in America, outselling the autobiography of Mark Twain and Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.
The war on dictionaries
Libraries took the brunt of it, and they weren't gracious about it.
The New York Public Library complained that puzzle enthusiasts "swarm to the dictionaries" and drove away legitimate readers. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh refused to stock crossword books at all, on the grounds that the city's money should go on more serious things. Los Angeles reportedly held patrons to five-minute turns with the dictionary.
Britain was worse. In Wimbledon, solvers did so much damage to the public library's dictionaries that the reference works were withdrawn from public access altogether. Elsewhere, librarians blotted out the puzzles in the free newspapers in their reading rooms - a deliberate campaign against their own readers.
London Zoo, January 1925: what is a word in three letters meaning a female swan?
The Zoo asks to be left alone
The best single artefact of the mania is a complaint from London Zoo in January 1925. It was under siege from solvers wanting to know what a word in three letters meaning a female swan might be, and what a female kangaroo was called, and what fragile creature in six letters ended in TO. The Zoo, it was reported, had enough to do caring for its own animals and couldn't act as consultant to the world at large.
The verdict of the press
The New York Times was magnificently against it. In November 1924 it called the craze a "sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern," insisting that solvers "get nothing out of it except a primitive sort of mental exercise." Five years later it declared the fad dead and buried.
In Britain, The Times ran a piece headed "An Enslaved America" - dating it precisely is harder than it should be, because the citations conflict - which called the crossword "almost a national menace: a menace because it is making devastating inroads on the working hours of every rank of society," and calculated that ten million people were losing half an hour a day to it. It concluded that the crossword had "dealt the final blow to the art of conversation."
Doctors joined in: the chairman of Maryland's Board of Mental Hygiene warned that puzzles "might easily unbalance a nervous mind."
Not everyone panicked. The Chicago Department of Health issued a bulletin titled "Crossworditis" which came down firmly in favour, on the grounds that "much energy must be put into amusement, to satisfy the play instinct within us."
What it left behind
There was a Broadway revue - Puzzles of 1925, at the Fulton, which gave Walter Pidgeon his Broadway debut and included a scene set in a sanitarium full of obsessed solvers. There was a song called "Cross-word Mamma You Puzzle Me (But Papa's Gonna Figure You Out)". Queen Mary took it up.
And there was the vocabulary. A magazine editor compiled a list of forty words the craze had dragged back into common use - abet, aver, eke, elan, eon, etch, ire, née, ooze, sate - which is to say the craze invented crosswordese, and we're still living with it.
Of all the fads of that faddish decade - flagpole sitting, mah-jongg, the Charleston - only the crossword survived. Both papers that denounced it, the Times of New York and the Times of London, would eventually print one.