CROSSWORDS: 1930s

Highlights | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1934 | 1935 | 1937 | 1938 | 1939 | References

Highlights

• 1930: The Times (UK) -- the "Thunderer" mentioned in letter to NYT editor [on right]
• "Together with The Times of London, yours [NYT] is...
  the only journal of prominence that has never succumbed to the lure of the cross-word puzzle.
  The craze -- the fad -- stage has passed, but there are still people numbering into the millions
  who look for their daily cross-word puzzle as regularly as for the weather predictions."
  ~NYT: 2/4/1930, p.20; "The Lure of the Puzzle"
• 1931: Dell Crossword Puzzle Magazine
• 1934: Acrostics
• 1938: Scrabble
• 1939: Frank Lewis
• "By the late 1930s, the crossword puzzle boom... had begun to fizzle --
  largely because the crossword puzzles in most newspapers had become predictable,
  repeating boring clues like 'Headgear' (HAT), 'Writing instrument' (PEN), 'Woody plant' (TREE).
  But readers of The New York Times never got bored with their crossword puzzle --
  because the Times didn't have one." ~BUJBR

1930

• the term "crossword" first appeared in a dictionary
• The Times Crossword at 90 -- cracking fun for the clued-up The Times; 2/1/2020
• A brief history of The Times crossword see our very first crossword, explore the history of the cryptic
  and get to know our longest-serving crossword compiler; The Times; 3/9/2014
• First Times Crossword UK; 1/20/2011

1931

• Dell (Crossword Puzzle) Magazine; longest running crossword magazine

1932

• Have His Carcase by Dorothy L Sayers
  "classic whodunnit with a crosswordy code" [Guardian]
• Dictionary Wrecked Word Contests and Cross-word Puzzles Blamed at Library;
  Evening Star (Wash. DC), A-3; 12/19/1932

1934

• "Acrostic puzzles, also known as 'Double-Crostics', were the invention of... Elizabeth S. Kingsley,
  a Wellesley graduate (class of 1898). Kingsley enjoyed crosswords, but they left her unsatisfied.
  'When you were done,' she said, 'all you had was a filled-in grid. What was the purpose?'
  So she invented the Double-Crostic, whose solution would leave the reader with an
  interesting thought or a worthwhile passage from literature.
  
  In March 1934, Kingsley walked in the offices of The Saturday Review of Literature
  and left a portfolio of 100 original acrostic puzzles, which impressed the editors.
  Within a few weeks they were appearing weekly. Simon & Schuster started
  publishing books of Kingsley's puzzles in 1935, and The New York Times Magazine
  introduced them on its puzzle page in 1943.
  
  Because Double-Crostic was a trademarked term (now lapsed), other publisher
  had to devise alternative names when they published their versions of the puzzle:
  Anacrostic, Quote Acrostic, Twin-Crostic, Double Cross, etc. This is why the
  same puzzle form has so many different names in different publications.
  
  Besides Kingsley, only four people have made Acrostics for the Times:
  Doris Nash Wortman (1953-67), Thomas Middleton (1967-99) and
  Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon (1999 to date), who work as a team."
  ~NYT Puzzle Mania, p. 4, Brief History of Acrostic Puzzles, 12/17/2017
• Crossword Mystery (Bobby Owen Mysteries #3) E.R. Punshon; 1934
• A 1934 murder mystery’s pages were printed out of order. Now the world is obsessed.
  only four people have ever solved the puzzle contained in the pages of 'Cain’s Jawbone.'
  TikTok helped turn the obscure, 100-page British novel into a craze; WaPo; 12/26/2022

1935

• Competition judges have to decide whether skill is involved or whether, as a lawyer for the police argues at Bow Street,
  "the words are ridiculously easy, and a child of 12 should have no difficulty in solving them"; 1935
• Word-Nerd Nation: The surprising history of The Stanford Daily's crossword 2/23/2023

1937

• The Great Rebus Craze of 1937 (Plus 4 Rebuses to Solve Yourself) MF; 12/28/2021

1938

• Criss-Crosswords => Lexiko => "Scrabble"
  created by architect named Alfred Mosher Butts

1939

• World War II: 1939-1945; Frank Lewis US Army code breaking; later NSA
• Frank Lewis, US Codecracker, Ingenious Puzzle Designer Wired; 12/2/2010
• The Winter Murder Case. A Philo Vance Story Van Dine, S. S.; "A detective story is a grim business,
  and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection
  of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity -- just as he goes to a ball game or to
  a cross-word puzzle? Dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a
  cross-word puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly."

References

• Wikipedia: 1930s
• The Decades That Invented the Future: Part 4: 1930s
  Radar; Works Progress Administration; Schrödinger's Cat; Pop Culture Characters; Ballpoint Pen;
  Nylon; Z1 computer by Zuse; Kodachrome; Mildred "Babe" Didrikson Zaharias; War of the Worlds;
  Electric Pinball; Volkswagen Beetle; Wired; 11/9/2012
• Paleofuture: 1930s
• A Look at the 13 Most Influential and Interesting Inventions from the 1930s 7/13/2019