Crossword Puzzle

I love working crossword puzzles. They keep my brain sharp and the ones with good clues force me to think in new ways and see things from different perspectives.

The crossword puzzle began in 1913, when Arthur Wynne was trying to think up new word games for the entertainment page of the Christmas edition of New York World magazine. It was a variation on a game called "word squares" his grandfather had taught him, where each word in the puzzle had to read the same both vertically and horizontally. Wynne originally called the game "Word-Cross" but a month later typesetters accidentally reversed the words in the title and the new version stuck.

The puzzles were popular, but magazine and newspaper editors hated them. They were difficult to print and easy to make errors in the fine-print clue section, so for the next ten years, if you wanted to work a crossword puzzle, you had to buy New York World. Then, in 1924, a young Columbia University graduate named Richard Simon had dinner at his aunt's house and his aunt asked him where she could buy a book of crossword puzzles for her daughter.

The answer was that she couldn't. No book existed. Simon, however, at that time was trying to break into the publishing business with college chum M. Lincoln Shuster. They went to the offices of New York World magazine and paid them $25 apiece for their most popular crossword puzzles, then spent the rest of their money publishing them in book form.

By the end of the year more than 300,000 copies had been sold, and Simon & Shuster had become a major publishing company. Today they are the largest publishing house in the United States and second largest in the world. All because of the humble crossword puzzle.

You can see (and try your hand at) the world's first crossword puzzle here.

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WHAT A JIGSAW PUZZLE TAUGHT ME ABOUT LIFE

Don't force things to fit together. If it's meant to be, it will come naturally.

Be sure to look at the big picture every so often.

Perseverance pays off.

When one spot stops working, move to another.

Working together with friends and family makes any task fun.

Establish your boundaries first.

Take time often to celebrate little successes.

Anything worth doing takes time and effort.

When you reach the last piece, don't be sad. Rejoice in the masterpiece you've created!

[written in 2001 by Jacquie Sewell; permission is granted to forward but not for commercial purposes. Thanks to Mikey's Funnies. Edited and abridged by Mark Raymond]

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WORDS for YOUR WEEK: "Understanding is knowing what to do; wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is actually doing it." (Tristan Gulberd)

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