Word: editor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Number Place (whose unacknowledged constructor, Shortz later determined, was Howard Garns, a retired architect from Indianapolis) ran once in a while in the Dell magazines, as well in the much slicker, savvier Games magazine, of which Shortz was an editor. The puzzle also ran in the magazines of Penny Press, a Norwalk, Ct., outfit that had the smarts to hire as editors some of the bright young folks from Games. The Penny Press magazines contained a more attractive mix of posers, and I found myself spending much more time with each issue of, say, Variety Puzzles, than with Pencil Puzzles...
...Shortz is indeed a tall, genial fellow and the best salesman crosswords could have. A puzzler from youth, he took a doctorate of Enigmatology (in a course of study he invented for himself) at Indiana University, was named the fourth crossword editor of the Times in 1993. That was the year of Shortz's 40th birthday and crosswords' 80th. The first one, devised by Arthur Wynne, appeared in the New York World on Dec. 21, 1913, and made the game an immediate sensation. But it was the achievement of Margaret Farrar, who became the Times' first crossword editor in1942...
...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...
...Times puzzle under Shortz' aegis has some famous fans, and Wordplay has tracked down 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...
...Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 Presidential race were the subjects of the most famous daily puzzle in Shortz' reign (and, the editor says, his favorite). In that Nov. 5 puzzle the clue for the central entry (two seven-letter spaces) read: "Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper!" It could be solved as either CLINTON ELECTED or BOBDOLE ELECTED. How? Each intersecting Down clue yielded two answers...