Word: gamesmanly
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Died. Bennett Cerf, 73, book publisher (Random House), nonstop punster and professional TV gamesman; in Mount Kisco, N.Y. After graduating from Columbia in 1919, Cerf bought his way into the book trade as a vice president of Boni & Liveright; in 1925 he borrowed from a wealthy uncle on Wall Street to buy the Modern Library from that failing firm for $200,000, later used its reprint profits to form a new company that would publish books at random, hence the name Random House. Despite his latter-day public reputation as syndicated humorist and smirking jokester of TV's What...
...decided that Broadway was ready for him. Broadway decided otherwise. Through no fault of the author, his first effort (Saturday Night) expired along with its producer. For a time, Stephen knocked out scripts for the television sitcom Topper and honed his skills as an amateur gamesman. Sondheim is one of the world's fastest cutthroat anagram players, and the walls of his Manhattan town house are covered with antique game boards. (Between shows, he used to concoct the tantalizing puzzles on the back pages of New York magazine.) Thanks to the theatrical interests of his mother, an interior decorator known...
Auden, who is now 63, has always been a cultural gamesman. Word schemes, puzzles and categories delight him. There are entries for acronyms, angelology, mnemonics, numbers, foreign phrase books. Always a zealous listmaker, he has included long entries of little-known names for woodpeckers and cuckoos and even lesser-known names for the human genitals (17 for the male and a lavish 28 for the female), as well as a wealth of arcane anecdote. Flipping to "Anagrams," for instance, the reader finds the story of a 17th century British eccentric named Eleanor Audley who, having plucked REVEALE O DANIEL...
Died. Stephen Potter, 69, the greatest contemporary gamesman of them all (see MODERN LIVING...
...book is loaded with stories of Jarrell the gamesman. He and Lowell used to sit in an empty classroom playing "Who's First?", a game in which they would downgrade fellow-poets until they were the only two left at the top. From his youth, he loved tennis and he lavishly admired professional football, spending countless Sunday afternoons in front of his TV and eventually making Johnny Unitas a figure for the poet's craft. Once, while a house guest, he lost a croquet game to some children, and his hostess detected him at 5 a.m. the next morning...