The making of a quote puzzle is an art. For one thing, the quote has to fit. Take another look at this 1960s puzzle. Think how difficult it was, before personal computers, for the anonymous gridsetter to find a saying that divided into three fifteen-letter segments.
TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT…no, that’s 17…FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN…also 17…IN THE BEGINNING, GOD—do all the best-known quotes start with 17?
But there’s more than one way to lay out a quote. Until a few years ago, almost all puzzles had rotational symmetry, so that meant quotes needed length symmetry. Here’s a 2010 design by Mike Shenk for the Wall Street Journal, from a quote by Evelyn Waugh:
I hope this gave some food for thought to the audience for “the investor’s newspaper.” Anyway, the quote breaks into strings of the following length: 17 / 21 / 7 / 9 / 7 / 21 / 17.
Modern puzzles care a bit less for traditional symmetries but will often try non-traditional ones. Here’s a mirror-symmetry puzzle 14 squares wide and 16 tall, by David Bukszpan and from 2022’s New York Times. The quote needs even-numbered strings to fit into the design, but it has no restrictions beyond that. It breaks down as 12 / 14 / 12 / 10 (and another 14 for its author, included below the quote itself).
Maybe this is just me, but the inclusion of two “conversational” answers in the center of this design makes it a little hard to parse this one. Without the highlighting, it reads like, “You can’t think of your troubles! Love ya while solving—oh, neat! A crossword!”
The selection of a quote-crossword quote goes beyond this “string symmetry,” though. Wait, let’s correct that: But the selection of a quote-crossword quote goes beyond this “string symmetry.”
See the difference? The second version is bottom-heavier, with the best saved for last. Crossword design tends to have a climax, with the last long entry giving the biggest punch, so quote crosswords’ final entries often crystallize the wit and meaning of all the words that have come before:
“Men are most apt to believe what they least understand.”
“I’m an old man and have known many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
“You can’t think of your troubles when solving a crossword.” (Margaret Farrar is a bit of bonus value, for those who know her role as the NYT's first puzzle editor.)
One problem with quote crosswords is that they involve a lot of work and guessing at words to get to that payoff. That becomes a bigger problem at the 21x21 size, too. The WSJ puzzle above has a bit more punch in the middle than at the end—“Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in Old Maid; the player who is finally left with it has lost.” But the solver almost needs that mid-range reward to keep going all the way to the end.
Even Gene Maleska, king of the quote crossword, tended to use only a few entries or a stepquote design when designing Sunday-sized puzzles. Neither of these would be options under the design standards we have today, which demand that a themed puzzle devote more squares to its theme.
So if standard quote crosswords have stumbled at larger sizes, what did that mean for the 125x125 size?
When I contemplated a quote theme for Ubercross Abecedaria Q…I realized I was going to need a non-standard approach. But which non-standard approach to take? More on that after tomorrow’s intermission.