In 1924, Richard Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster, who had recently opened a publishing house in New York, honored the pleas of Simon’s puzzle-loving aunt and printed a collection of crosswords, throwing in a free pencil to sweeten the deal. The first crossword puzzle book—an untested and decidedly nonliterary format—worried the firm so much that the firm’s name did not appear on the book, which had a small printing of 3,600 copies.
The publisher needn’t have been concerned; the book was an immediate success. The first run sold out quickly and the company ran additional printings. The book eventually sold more than 100,000 copies, perhaps spurred on by groups like the Amateur Cross Word Puzzle League of America, itself a creation of marketing-savvy Simon & Schuster.
The league began the process of standardizing the appearance of crosswords as early as 1924, instituting rules such as “all over interlock,” which meant that no part of the grid could be completely cut off by the black squares; only one-sixth of the squares could be black; and the grid design had to be symmetrical. Other changes, like outlawing two-letter words, came later.
America had now tasted the satisfaction of creating order out of chaos, the Zen of making something from nothing. Solving crosswords could fairly be called a craze. The activity had become so prevalent that the Times of London decried it in an editorial called “An Enslaved America.” Devotees spiced their conversation with obsolete words that were cropping up in crossword puzzles. There was even a 1924 song called “Cross-word Mamma You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out).”
The crossword fad, however, plagued librarians, who complained that puzzle “fans” were swarming the reference desk, clamoring for dictionaries and encyclopedias to help find answers, and pushing aside more “legitimate” readers and students.
Crosswords were now being published almost everywhere—except in the New York Times, the last major metropolitan newspaper to offer the puzzle. A 1924 editorial in the Times called crosswords “a primitive sort of mental exercise.”
But the war that began for America in 1941 gave crossword puzzles an important new function: escaping the woes of the news pages. Two weeks after the U.S. joined the hostilities, the New York Times’ Sunday editor sent a memo to the publisher saying they “ought to proceed with the puzzle” to give readers something to do during those bleak blackout hours. To bolster his suggestion, the editor attached a letter from the crossword pioneer Margaret Petherbridge Farrar. “I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this type of pastime in an increasingly worried world,” she wrote. “You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword.”