When I was small, my dad picked up The Book of Lists by David Wallechinsky, his father Irving Wallace and his sister Amy Wallace. Starting with “The 5 Most Hated and Feared Persons in History” and ending with “20 Favorite Scents of Men and Women,” “The 2 1/2 Angels Mentioned by Name in the Bible,” and the Ten Commandments. In those pre-internet days, TBoL was an almost unheard-of way to parse and present information. I fell in love.
The book’s influenced me ever since. Anytime I take on a creative task that it feels like I can’t handle, I break it down into smaller list items that I know I can.
Part of the point of an Ubercross is to see what can be done with crosswords when they’re freed from their space limitations. That applies to a few really long answers, but also to even more really long clues. List-format clues would be a little too long to fit into a newspaper puzzle, but here? No problem.
I thought about working with logos, but I really wanted to have only one puzzle that used visual elements in the clues, and trying to describe the Pepsi logo without using the word “Pepsi” gets awkward, fast.
I thought about working with letter banks, a wordplay type that I really love. But some aspects of letter banks had already been covered in the Abecedaria’s overall design, and others overlapped with a theme I’d reserved for a later section.
I thought about working with lyrics, as in song lyrics, and that was a stronger contender. But the possibilities of lists fired my imagination more. And I wasn’t sure I’d know the boundaries between “famous” and “obscure” in today’s music scene—we’re not listening to as many of the same songs any more, I feel like.
The “lists” theme could result in some very long entries and much shorter ones, which helped me around another design issue: the capital letter “L” is a study in contrasts. It’s almost entirely vertical until you get to the bottom, and then that bottom is firmly horizontal. I lined its verticals with short theme entries, saving my big ones for the “climax” at the bottom.
There’s also a fair range of difficulty between the entries. One or two, I figure people will start filling in immediately. But there’s at least one that I don’t think anyone is going to get without crossings. It relies on a certain trait that’s actually pretty rare in entertainment properties, though a lot more of them have this trait in theory.
“LISTS” is only five letters, so I could do my shortest theme-revealing entry ever.
I still love lists and I really wanted to play with doing them right—partly despite and partly because of what’s been done to the list format since those innocent Wallace/Wallechinsky days. But I won’t get into that here. Why should I, when I can get another list out of it tomorrow?
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FYI, it was easy to miss, but I coincidentally stumbled upon it yesterday: CBS had a 4-part miniseries on the Book of Lists, 1982, starring Bill Bixby. https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/04/arts/tv-first-book-of-lists-and-a-greek-goes-home.html
W, W, and W not quite a precursor to the WWW ;-)