The following is slightly edited from a passage I wrote for my On Crosswords book about a decade ago. No new information has come to light since then.
Abdul Karim-Qasem, a Yemeni crosswordmaker in his early forties, decided to court the recognition of the Guinness Book of World Records with a 320,500-square puzzle. To do this, he made tremendous sacrifices, and not just on his own behalf.
Many times I did not give my children what they needed because I was obsessed with rising to the challenge of breaking this record. Many times I did not provide my children with their simple and serious needs because of this endeavor.
He worked with pen and paper, not a laptop. At one point, he had to use burn medication as ink. The work, he says, cost him much of his eyesight and led to severe back problems.
Qasem admitted an addiction to crosswords: “I am crazy about playing this game; I used to play crosswords with my friends while we were chewing qat,” but, he claimed, he wasn’t just pursuing this goal for himself.
He was doing it for Yemen, so that Yemen could have a place in the record books. In Yemen’s current days of civil war and humanitarian crisis, it’s a nice thought that a citizen wanted to distinguish it with an intellectual pursuit.
When Qasem ran out of resources before finishing, he appealed to his governate, and then to the Yemeni President himself. Then-President Saleh was a notorious kleptocrat and no friend to the arts in general, but for Qasem, for whatever reason, he came through. He gave him some supplies, and the puzzle was finished. Or…so the story goes.
But no photographs of this miraculous puzzle seem to be extant. Guinness representatives claim not to have heard of Qasem.
Whether he actually finished his masterpiece, or merely claimed to, the specter of his ruined health and malnourished children was enough to make me think twice about the quest. I left it on the back burner for many years, busy with other pursuits…but a couple more verified winners drew me back into the race.