Crossword puzzles have a surprising history, controversial future

On a chilly January night in 1924, fledgling publisher Richard Simon was having dinner with his Aunt Wixie when she asked if he knew where she could buy a book of crossword puzzles. None existed.

At the time, the crossword was little more than a decade old and it had only appeared in newspapers, namely the New York World, where the puzzle — initially known as a “Word-Cross” until a typesetting error — was first printed in 1913.

Aunt Wixie was out of luck, but her question had planted a seed. Simon left dinner and met with his business partner, Max Schuster. A crossword book seemed like it could be a potential winner, but the two feared being “hooted out of the publishing business.”

Their contacts at the New York World declared it “The worst idea since Prohibition.”

Fearing ruination — and tiptoeing under a dummy imprint name, Plaza Publishing — Simon and Schuster went ahead with their crossword book gamble. Days after publication, the duo couldn’t get into their office, because a pile of orders blocked the door. Their puzzle book was an instant success, a formidable money spinner and the first ever book release for Simon & Schuster, today one of the “Big Five” publishing companies.

It was just the beginning.

“That year, three Simon & Schuster [crossword] collections (they’d long since discarded the Thalia mask of Plaza Publishing) took the top three slots of the nonfiction bestseller list,” Natan Last writes in his new book, “Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle.”  For the second edition, priced more modestly at 25 cents, one eager distributor placed an order for 250,000 — then the largest single purchase in publishing history. Simon & Schuster has never, in the century since its founding, not had a crossword puzzle book in print.”

Latan, a puzzle insider himself — in 2008, at age 16, he was then the youngest constructor to publish a Sunday crossword in The New York Times — highlights some of the key moments in word puzzles over the years.

“The crossword has this Forrest Gump-like ubiquity throughout history,” he told The Post.

Margaret Petherbridge, who edited Simon & Schuster’s first crossword book, plus many subsequent iterations, later became The New York Times’ first crossword editor. Petherbridge’s father invested her substantial crossword royalties in U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. In 1926, she married John C. Farrar and later used money from puzzles and stocks to underwrite his publishing venture, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Given the Gray Lady’s august standing in “Crossworld,” readers may be surprised to learn the Times adopted puzzles remarkably late. Until 1942, it was the only major metropolitan daily paper that didn’t offer crosswords. The newspaper even disapproved of the craze, printing an anti-crossword column titled, “A Familiar Form of Madness,” asking psychologists to solve “the mental peculiarities of mobs.”

How things have changed!

“The puzzle has become big business: the Times Games app, part of a suite of digital products that brought in some $1.1 billion in 2022 revenue, effectively cross-subsidizes the rest of the paper,” writes Last. As one Times staffer put it in a 2023 interview: “the half joke . . . repeated internally is that The New York Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.”

Yet, despite their reputation as sedate morning diversions, crosswords are not immune to controversies. Last has been at the center of some of them.

In 2020, the author, who also interned for legendary crossword editor Will Shortz at the Times, wrote an article about the “hidden bigotry” of the puzzles for the Atlantic. That same year, he was a leading signee of an open letter to the Times calling for more diversity amongst staffers involved with crossword puzzle testing and creation. The paper later made some of the changes called for.

Last praises fellow puzzle writer Eric Agard who, like many other young people in the trade, has banned Harry Potter references given J. K. Rowling’s vocal views on trans people and tweeted about the “liberatory potential for crosswords.”

But, for most readers and puzzlers, crosswords are a fun way to pass the minutes and hours with a cup of coffee — not a canvas for politics, even in these divisive times.

Last once appeared on The Martha Stewart Show to discuss crosswords with the 84-year-old domestic doyenne.

When asked if she was a solver, Stewart quipped, “Well, I did a lot of crosswords when I was in prison.”

Christopher J. Yates is the co-author of the puzzle book “5 Minute Murder” and author of the novel “The Rabbit Club.”