There’s more than 33 total puzzles in the section. You’ve heard of I Spy? Walter Wick created an original I Spy puzzle for this that’s really cool. It’s for solvers of course, but it’s also just a celebration of puzzles too. There’s wonderful sidebars and interviews with the puzzle makers - how they got into puzzles, what writing instruments they use to solve puzzles. There’s a letter exchange between Will Shortz and Margaret Farrar, the original crossword editor. It will be fun for people who are solvers and not.
Was there an entire team behind the Super Mega? I will say pièce de résistance is this crossword we’re calling the Super Mega, the largest ever in The New York Times. It is designed to be a traditional Sunday puzzle, so it’s the most difficult of the week? He wrote it, and Will edited it as he does all puzzles. It’s a difficulty level Tuesday / Wednesday, but the sheer size of it of course means it will take a long time to do. It’s more difficult than doing a Tuesday / Wednesday. But we didn’t want it to be impossible to finish. NY: Random House, 1992.We had this vision that people would - in the way some families will put out a jigsaw puzzle for the holidays - we thought some families would put out this big crossword. During World War II, she worked for the Red Cross and the War Council in Ossining, New York. The mother of three children, she was a member of the Children's Book Committee of the Child Study Association (1935–1942) and was active on various school committees. She also introduced topical puzzles that centered on a single theme, like Christmas, food, animals, or sports.įarrar also edited a mystery book for Farrar, Straus, the publishing company cofounded by her husband. "I suppose they're still marvelling about the prophetic insight of Times reporters and the queer places they hide their news." Farrar was credited with modernizing the numbering system and using more lively definitions based on current events, including the titles of movies, books, and plays. "During the war we had the Russians taking an important objective two weeks before they really got there," she once related. Farrar admitted that she made enough mistakes to prove she was human. In final editing, she would check again for errors and to make sure that words and definition were not being repeated from puzzle to puzzle. She began by working out the puzzle to make sure it was interesting and of sufficient difficulty. In 1950, under Farrar's editorship, the newspaper introduced a daily crossword puzzle, and over the years also produced 18 collections of puzzles.Īlthough Farrar constructed many puzzles herself, she usually edited the work of other constructors. In 1942, The New York Times, the only major American newspaper to hold out against the crossword-puzzle craze, called on Farrar to edit a puzzle for the Times Sunday Magazine. Later, she also produced similar books for Pocket Books as well as a Crossword Puzzle Omnibus series. The book sold nearly 400,000 copies the first year, and Farrar continued to edit puzzle books for Simon and Schuster at the rate of about two a year. Publisher Simon and Schuster was so dubious about its success that they issued it under another imprint.
Gregory Hartswick and Prosper Buranelli, edited the Cross Word Puzzle Book, the first of its kind. By 1924, crosswords had become a national pastime, and Farrar and two colleagues from the paper, F. Before her retirement in 1968, she had edited over 130 collections of puzzles.Ī history major at Smith College, Farrar worked in a bank before finding a position with the New York World, where, as secretary to the Sunday editor, she was placed in charge of the weekly crossword puzzle, a feature the World pioneered in 1913. Once called the "world's supreme authority on crosswords," Margaret Farrar was the first editor of the much-revered crossword puzzles of The New York Times and also collaborated on the first Cross Word Puzzle Book. from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1919 married John Chipman Farrar (a publisher, co-founder of Farrar, Straus, and author), on children: John Farrar Alison Farrar Janice Farrar. Born Margaret Petherbridge on March 23, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York died on June 11, 1984, in New York, New York daughter and one of three children of Henry Wade (an executive with the National Licorice Company) and Margaret Elizabeth (Furey) Petherbridge graduated from Berkeley Institute, Brooklyn, New York, 1916 B.A. American crossword-puzzle editor for the New York Times.