Spoiler Suuu...Monday: Quote Crosswords (1 of 4)
When you need multiple entries to get a balance.
When is it a good idea to write a crossword clue that no one knows the answer to?
If you think the answer is “never,” think again. It’s true that puzzles exist to be solved, but theme answers are often doing tricky stuff that almost no solver is going to guess, at least not in a vacuum. How many times, when doing a puzzle, have you needed to do most of the crossings for the first long answer before you realize “Ohhh, it’s STARR STRUCK, like STAR STRUCK but with an extra R” or whatever?
That’s a feature, not a bug. Some answers you get right away, but others, especially the longer ones, are more of a discovery.
The traditional quote crossword is a simple version of that discovery. Clues for its key answers might read, “Part 1 of a quotation from Emily Dickinson,” then “Part 2 of the quote” and so on. There might be a bit more of a hint— “Part 1 of a quote from Plato relevant to today’s politics”—but there doesn’t have to be.
Almost nobody keeps a list of famous quotations in their heads, can calculate their letter lengths, and matches those letter lengths to the available space in the grid. Figuring out the quote is therefore a journey of discovery that lasts most of the solving time.
The quote crossword has had its ups and downs. Its heyday was probably between the Sixties and the Eighties, when crossword puzzles were more literary. (For better and for worse.) Their champion was Eugene T. Maleska, a prolific contributor to the New York Times crossword many years before he became editor. In March 22, 1964, he used a 23x23 grid to fit in this quotation, clued as the words of Mark Twain:
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” (If you’d told me this was a Yogi Berra quote instead, I’d believe it.)
A few months later, he rolled out this beauty on July 5, 1964:
“Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers” is one heck of a message to send somebody who’s just trying to relax with their Sunday paper, and there were other issues with the “stepquote” design Maleska used. Compared to modern crossword designs, these puzzles didn’t have a lot of theme density, and the stepquote has a few uncrossed letters. There would be no crossed words to tell you “no” if you decided that the quote had to be “Contentment in a warm sty? Fire at Ed, sand sleepers!”
Still, readers seemed to like the stepquote, as did then-editor Margaret Farrar: it appeared 20 more times over the years, only petering out in 1995, early in Will Shortz’s tenure. And chopped-up quotes like this bit from Montaigne (an anonymous puzzle from March 5, 1966) show up now and then even today…
…though today’s quote puzzles are more likely to use the words of stand-up comedians or TV shows than the literary classics.
Today’s quote puzzles have other differences with those of the Sixties. For one thing, they’re fewer! Next time out, we’ll get into why.
