I just finished reading Natan Last’s 2025 book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. It was… fatiguing. Now, I myself am a “discursive” writer, so I’m throwing stones from a glass house here; but it seemed to me that Last’s every paragraph consisted of three or four anecdotes halfway told, capped off with some nonsensical simile. Open the book at random to page 31:

On December 11, 2022, Eric [Albert] suffered a hemorrhagic stroke of his cerebellum. He’s lucky to be alive: around 50 percent of patients die in a month, half of those within the first two days. When we first spoke in April 2023, I immediately asked if his language had been affected, then regretted it. But he was fine, he said. The neurologists don’t know why the stroke happened, or how he recovered his cognition so quickly. He says he repeated the French he was learning to himself in the ICU. I imagined him, was almost ashamed to imagine him, saying ciré ciré ciré, épée épée épée — as if the accent marks were stray neurons in need of repair — or an item from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake I’d just seen in Word Ways because it’s the only “word” with five or more Q’s: Quoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiquoiq! In Joyce’s Wake, it’s preceded by the line: “He lifts the lifewand and the dumb speak.” I remembered analyses of Broca’s aphasia I’d read studying neuroscience in college […]

Page 163:

In P.G. Wodehouse’s 1957 novel, Something Fishy (called The Butler Did It in its American release), Lord Uffenham, every bit an imperious sneeze as his name suggests, barks at his wittier niece, Jane: “[…] Run and ask Keggs what the dickens ‘Adventurer goes in for outrageous road-speed’ is supposed to signify. Tell him it’s urgent. And I want some more coffee… Yer can’t drink too much coffee. It bucks you up. It stimulates the mental processes.” The answer — DESPERADO, an “outrageous” anagram of ROAD SPEED and synonym of “adventurer” — is supplied by the august valet Augustus Keggs. Then Uffenham proceeds to a second stinker: “Desperado, eh? Capital. Now, go and ask him what the devil ‘So the subordinate professional on trial gets wages in advance not without demur’ means.” For the intellectual or the upper-crust peer, the crossword and coffee must be consumed; who labors for it is immaterial. Eliot’s brooder Prufrock “measured out [his] life in coffee spoons,” Margaret Farrar called the Times Saturday crossword a “two cups of coffee puzzle,” Lord Uffenham has his niece make the coffee and his butler solve the puzzle.

The butler did it; but who is there to say, besides Jane, that Uffenham didn’t solve it himself? One imagines Keggs following Uffenham on a summery lawn the color of turtle shells, moving the lord’s croquet balls, muttering “Very good shot, sir” as he does._ […]

Does one, though? Anyway, if you are excited by the mere idea of 300 pages of this sort of thing — accent marks as damaged neurons, lawns the color of not just one turtle shell (i.e. a mottled brown) but several, the names of Simon & Schuster inflated into “fat illegible balloons pricked into oblivion by a skyscraper’s spire” (page 50), a missed encounter between Vladimir Nabokov and his future wife Véra described as “a word golf of only one, as if embalming a simpler past” (page 169), etc., then you’re in for a treat. I myself alternately slogged and skimmed. Many of the book’s chapters were first published individually in magazines, which explains how the same anecdotes keep recurring. “Three-letter word for a female swan” appears on page 54 and again on page 222. There are two capsule biographies of Elizabeth Gorski and at least three of Arthur Wynne.

Last’s shotgun approach does give starting points for some interesting web sleuthing. For example, he reprints a butterfly-shaped Russian-language crossword drawn by Nabokov on 1926-07-06. The image he uses just comes from Wikipedia, which got it from a tweet; but Nabokov’s tiny handwriting is solvably transcribed in Письма к Вере (“Letters to Véra,” 2014). (Thanks to Russian StackExchange for that link!) The solution to Nabokov’s butterfly crossword is (spoiler) here.

Last mentions that Georges Perec, of La Disparition lipogram fame, also wrote crosswords (in French). See one of Perec’s, and solution, at Derek Harrison’s blog. Perec’s crosswords seem to be collected in two books: Les mots croisés (1979; ISBN 2863740032) and Les mots croisés II (1986; ISBN 2867440661).

This reminds me that Stephen Sondheim, of Broadway fame, not only wrote cryptic crosswords for New York magazine in 1968–1969 but is thereby credited with introducing the cryptic to American audiences. His fantastic series of cryptics is not hard to find online, e.g. here and here and even on nymag.com (1, 2, 3). My favorite is 1968-04-29’s “One Shy.”

Fun fact: Sondheim apparently inspired the “Andrew Wyke” character in Sleuth. (Run, don’t walk, to see the 1972 film; skip the bizarre 2007 remake.) From the New York Times of 1996-03-10:

SONDHEIM: Did I ever tell you about the time I met Sir Laurence Olivier? [He] said, “Oh, Mr. Sondheim, I’m so delighted to meet you. I’ve been playing you.” Of course I thought he meant playing records … I said, “Which show?” And he replied, “No, I’ve been playing you in the movie.”

I should mention that a really great book about crosswords and crosswording is Coral Amende’s The Crossword Obsession (2001). It consists almost entirely of crossword constructors’ own words, and is fantastically entertaining. This anecdote from John Samson has lived rent-free in my head for the past 25 years:

SAMSON: The first crossword I sent [NYT puzzle editor Eugene Maleska] was so bad he wrote back: “This is really amateurish. Do us both a favor and never send me another one again. One of your entries, OX MORGUE, clued as ‘Where dead oxen are carted off to,’ is ridiculous; also, your diagram is not symmetric, and on top of that it contains unkeyed letters.” Needless to say, I noticed he had taken the time to reply to me (written in longhand), which prompted another effort on my part. …

By the way, Wodehouse never gives the answer to Lord Uffenham’s cryptic clue “So the subordinate professional on trial gets wages in advance not without demur,” but I see a strong case for PAY UNDER PROTEST.