For the last century, and to the chagrin of many journalists, crossword puzzles have been among the most popular features in newspapers. With Thinking Inside the Box, New Yorker essayist Adrienne Raphel has written what likely will stand as the crossword’s definitive history. She comes well prepared for the task. Throughout her childhood, Raphel’s father organized family-wide competitions based on the Monday New York Times puzzle. She knows her way around those numbered clues.
Although word games and grids have a long history, the first crossword as we (more or less) know it was published in the New York World in 1913. It was called “Word-Cross” and was diamond-shaped, not rectangular. Two weeks later a typographical error transformed it into “Cross-Word,” the name that stuck once the hyphen disappeared. The puzzle caught on instantly and was widely emulated. Within 10 years it achieved the form familiar today with those all-important black boxes acting as the dark matter influencing the shape of these little linguistic universes.
As anyone who cares already knows, crosswords vary greatly, but judging them by their “difficulty” is an exercise in relativity What might be easy for an upper-class New Yorker could challenge most lower middle class Midwesterners. Raphel explores unconscious biases that often inform the “constructors” of the puzzles. Take note: the number of women in the field of crossword composition declined with rise of crossword softwear. Welcome to the boys club, girls! Enter at your own risk.
So what’s the value in being a cruciverbalist, as crossword players are called? Raphel cites the puzzles’ power to awaken the brain or, conversely, calm the mind by refocusing it. Successfully filling in those white boxes gives the player a sense of control in a world that is out of our control. For some, doing crosswords becomes a compulsion.
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And yes, there have been scandals: A few years back, a Baptist minister moonlighting as a prolific crossword constructor turned out to be an avid plagiarist. He got away with copying other constructors for years because cruciverbalists are often obsessed with one crossword puzzle to the exclusion of most others. Nobody was peering over the pastor’s shoulder.
Raphel recounts this and many other stories with a charming and well-informed sense of style. One can bet that she aces the hardest puzzles the New York Times produces.
