I began by trying to do one the next Sunday, and thus experienced the throes of acute agony that come to all solvers of puzzles on discovering definitions left out, numbers wrong, hideously warped definitions, words not to be found inside of any known dictionary, foreign words—very foreign[[10]]—and words that had no right to be dragged out of their native obscurity. Then and there, with my left hand reposing on a dictionary and my right raised in air, I took an oath to edit the cross words to the essence of perfection. From then on, I instituted the procedure of doing the puzzles myself on the page proof—sort of trying it on the dog—applying the principle,
“If it be not fair to me,
What care I how fair it be!”
Since that momentous day, F.P.A.’s visits have grown less frequent—in fact, he has to make up excuses to come in and converse on other matters—and the cross words even came in for an occasional bouquet in Sam Pepys’s diary. So now you all know whom to thank for the perfection (more or less) of the cross word puzzle found each Sunday on the World Magazine’s Ingenuities Page.
Margaret Petherbridge [[11]]
HOW TO SOLVE THEM
Solving a cross word puzzle offers numerous enjoyments of which the uninitiated are ignorant. There is the pure esthetic stimulation of looking at the pattern with its neat black and white squares, like a floor in a cathedral or a hotel bathroom; there is the challenge of the definitions, titillating the combative ganglion that lurks in all of us; there is the tantalizing elusiveness of the one little word that will satisfactorily fill a space and give clues to others that we know not of; and there is the thrill of triumph as the right word is found, fitted, and its attendant branches and roots spring into being. No better illustration could be used than a recent brilliant construction of Mr. Gelett Burgess, published in the Sunday World Magazine.
Consider the solver as he faces his problem. The numbers in the squares, he knows, refer to the definitions; in the system of numbering used in this book, the first letters only are indicated by numbers. Thus 1 horizontal means a word that will fill the space following the figure up to the next black square.
Horizontal