Word: cryptics
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...wasted fruitful hours filling in the blanks in all these publications determined that Number Place was a pleasant enough diversion, if not nearly so demanding or compelling as Cross Sums (aka Sum Totals), a crossword with numbers, or that sublimely torturous form of the crossword known as the Cryptic, about which more later...
...Queen Victoria's bustle. Beneath it was one of three puzzles: an acrostic (twice as much work for half the fun), a diagramless crossword (you're given the clues but not the grid - why?) and, once in four weeks, Mel Taub's Puns and Anagrams - sort of a kindergarten cryptic. You never saw the features that made Games magazine such instructive fun, such as Flower Power or the Spiral, and rarely found those puzzles' authors, some of the brightest minds in puzzling...
...Into the stale Times stable Shortz brought both the best of the old guard, including Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, who had been creating cryptic puzzles for The Atlanticsince 1976, and some of the young geniuses, like Henry Hook and Patrick Berry, who had made their names at Games. And for the first time, the Times gave credit to the authors of the daily puzzles, who had previously been anonymous. (The daily crossword was the one place in the paper where the cult of personality bypassed the author and resided only with the editor...
...most of them. Stewart, attacking a Tuesday puzzle, says, "I'm so confident, I'm gonna do it in glue stick." Dan Okrent, a former TIME executive who was the New York Times' Public Editor, notes that the best crossword solvers are mathematicians and musicians. (This applies especially to cryptic puzzles, a British refinement of the form that was imported to America when Stephen Sondheim created 40 or so for New York magazine in the early '70s. A few years later the cryptic became a regular feature of Harper's magazine in puzzles constructed by E.R. Galli and Richard Maltby...
...cherished. For the aficionado, Wordplay performs a special service. It lends faces to revered names, the heroes of puzzleworld: constructors Payne and Reagle, Stanley Newman, Mel Rosen and Fred Piscop. (I wish I could have found '90s phenom Patrick Berry, to whom Maltby and Galli occasionally sublet their Atlantic cryptic page, and Henry Hook, the dark prince of cryptics and crossword editor of the Boston Globe...