Thinking Inside the Box
Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them
(Sprache: Englisch)
This cultural and personal history of crosswords and their fans, written by an aficionado, is diverting, informative, and discursive. The New York Times Book Review, Editors Choice
A delightful, erudite, and immersive exploration of the...
A delightful, erudite, and immersive exploration of the...
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This cultural and personal history of crosswords and their fans, written by an aficionado, is diverting, informative, and discursive. The New York Times Book Review, Editors ChoiceA delightful, erudite, and immersive exploration of the crossword puzzle and its fascinating history
Almost as soon as it appeared, the crossword puzzle became indispensable to our lives. Invented practically by accident in 1913, when a newspaper editor at the New York World was casting around for something to fill empty column space, it became a roaring commercial success almost overnight. Ever since then, the humble puzzle has been an essential ingredient of any newspaper worth its salt. But why, exactly, are the crossword s satisfactions so sweet?
Blending first-person reporting from the world of crosswords with a delightful telling of its rich literary history, Adrienne Raphel dives into the secrets of this classic pastime. Thinking Inside the Box is an ingenious love letter not just to the abiding power of the crossword but to the infinite joys and playful possibilities of language itself.
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FUN: Arthur Wynne,
Margaret Petherbridge Farrar, and the Origins of the Puzzle
The story of the crossword begins with the birth of Arthur Wynne on June 22, 1891, in Liverpool, England, where his father was the editor of the local Liverpool Mercury. When Wynne was nineteen, he emigrated to Pittsburgh, where he took a job on the Pittsburgh Press and played violin in the city's symphony orchestra. Soon, Wynne moved to New York and joined the staff of the New York World.
The World had launched in New York City in 1860. Each issue cost a penny. In 1864, the paper's editor published forged reports supposedly from President Abraham Lincoln that urged men to join the Union army. Lincoln was furious, the editor was arrested, and the World shut down for several days. The paper limped along printing propaganda for its various owners until 1883, when famed publisher Joseph Pulitzer bought the operation. In an aggressive circulation-boosting campaign, Pulitzer pumped the paper full of pulpy news and yellow journalism, transforming the World into one of the most popular publications in the country and the first in America to reach over one million subscribers daily. Pulitzer hired blockbuster reporters like Nellie Bly, who performed such gonzo stunts as traveling, for the World, around the world in seventy-two days, just to best Phileas Fogg's famous eighty. In 1890, operations moved into a brand-new, eighteen-story, gold-domed skyscraper next to City Hall on Park Row at the bottom tip of Manhattan, making the World's home the world's then-tallest office building. In 1911, the paper launched its weekly color supplement: FUN.
By 1913, Arthur Wynne had been put in charge of FUN. For that year's Christmas edition, set to run on Sunday, December 21, Wynne was in a jam: he had to fill space but had nothing to fill it with. He'd been instructed to add more puzzles to
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FUN, and Wynne, in desperation, turned his writer's block into a grid, a diamond-shaped interlocking set of squares flanked by clues that ran differently across and down. "FUN's Word-Cross Puzzle" instructed readers, "Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions." The crossword conceit-here are clues, here is a grid, go forth and fill the grid with the answers to these clues-was born.
Wynne's Word-Cross looks like a modern crossword, with obvious differences. It's a diamond, not a square, and rather than black spaces throughout, there's one concentrated blank in the middle, like a doughnut hole. Rather than separating the clues into Across and Down, Wynne listed clues by giving their beginning and ending squares.
Wynne's puzzle doesn't deploy pyrotechnic layers of wordplay. The clues proceed as fairly straightforward definitions; none of them ask the reader to solve a riddle, or decode an acrostic, or undo a pun to arrive at the solution. Ambiguity is on the level of information rather than imagination: "A bird" (DOVE), for example, could have any number of solutions, but this puzzle is looking only for flying animals, not, say, jailbirds or stool pigeons. Most clues are fairly generic. Many of the clues establish a bond between the clue writer and the solver, a wink from Wynne to us: "What we should all be," for example (MORAL), or, "What this puzzle is" (HARD). The puzzle also repeats itself: "A pigeon," like "A bird," is also DOVE. Some require extremely esoteric knowledge-"The fibre of the gomuti palm" (DOH) would likely be impossible for most nonbotanists, particularly since the gomuti is far more common in Indonesia than Manhattan-so filling in the puzzle relies not only on the reader's capacity to get the clues via the definitions alone but on the simultaneous ability to deduce the answer from corresponding letters in the grid.
FUN and the origin myth of Wynne's invention notwithstanding, par
Wynne's Word-Cross looks like a modern crossword, with obvious differences. It's a diamond, not a square, and rather than black spaces throughout, there's one concentrated blank in the middle, like a doughnut hole. Rather than separating the clues into Across and Down, Wynne listed clues by giving their beginning and ending squares.
Wynne's puzzle doesn't deploy pyrotechnic layers of wordplay. The clues proceed as fairly straightforward definitions; none of them ask the reader to solve a riddle, or decode an acrostic, or undo a pun to arrive at the solution. Ambiguity is on the level of information rather than imagination: "A bird" (DOVE), for example, could have any number of solutions, but this puzzle is looking only for flying animals, not, say, jailbirds or stool pigeons. Most clues are fairly generic. Many of the clues establish a bond between the clue writer and the solver, a wink from Wynne to us: "What we should all be," for example (MORAL), or, "What this puzzle is" (HARD). The puzzle also repeats itself: "A pigeon," like "A bird," is also DOVE. Some require extremely esoteric knowledge-"The fibre of the gomuti palm" (DOH) would likely be impossible for most nonbotanists, particularly since the gomuti is far more common in Indonesia than Manhattan-so filling in the puzzle relies not only on the reader's capacity to get the clues via the definitions alone but on the simultaneous ability to deduce the answer from corresponding letters in the grid.
FUN and the origin myth of Wynne's invention notwithstanding, par
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Autoren-Porträt von Adrienne Raphel
Adrienne Raphel has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, and Poetry, among other publications. Her debut poetry collection, What Was It For, won the Rescue Press Black Box Poetry Prize. Born in southern New Jersey and raised in northern Vermont, she holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from Harvard.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Adrienne Raphel
- 2021, 304 Seiten, Maße: 13,8 x 21,2 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: PENGUIN BOOKS
- ISBN-10: 0525522107
- ISBN-13: 9780525522102
- Erscheinungsdatum: 30.03.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
"This cultural and personal history of crosswords and their fans, written by an aficionado, is diverting, informative and discursive." Editors' Choice, The New York Times Book Review"Raphel proves a skilled cultural historian, dipping into newspaper archives and movie reels and private correspondence to describe how the crossword came to conquer the world. . . . In my favorite memoir chapter, Raphel visits a writing retreat to construct her own crossword. After much technical discussion of grids and themes and fill, she writes: 'I became a mechanical god. I shifted gears; I tuned each letter individually. I was a chemist, titrating my micro-universe; a lepidopterist, shifting a butterfly s wing onto a pin.' She was also, in this and only this, a failure. Her puzzle was rejected, as so many are, by The Times. But her affectionate exegesis of this pastime, this passion, this 'temporary madness,' succeeds. Like a good crossword, her book challenges us to back away from our assumptions, allows us to think differently and apply ourselves again." Peter Sagal, New York Times Book Review
Fascinating . . . Raphel is particularly good at shifting viewpoints. . . . Chapters, such as This Is Not a Crossword, looking at the intersection between surrealism and crosswords, fairly sing Raphel s approach is reminiscent of Mary Roach s work, and even cruciverbalists well versed in their hobby s history will discover something illuminating here. Nonpuzzling readers may discover a new hobby. Library Journal
Raphel delivers an intriguing and informative look at the crossword puzzle. . . This enjoyable survey illuminates many lesser-known aspects of a wildly popular pastime. Publishers Weekly
For crossword puzzlers of every ilk, from solvers of the Monday-edition no-brainer to pencil-chewing addicts of the cryptic, Thinking Inside The Box is a gold mine of revelations. If there is a
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pantheon of cruciverbalist scholars, Adrienne Raphel has established herself squarely within it. Mary Norris, bestselling author of Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen
Thinking Inside the Box is a witty, wise, and wonderfully weird journey that will change the way you think. Raphel is an insatiably curious and infectiously passionate guide who plunges headfirst into the rich world of puzzles and the people who love them to reveal the fascinating acrobatics of language and the inner life of words. This book is a delight. Bianca Bosker, bestselling author of Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste
If you remember precisely where you were when you first encountered the words ETUI and ONER, I suspect you ll be enchanted by Adrienne Raphel s Thinking Inside the Box. This delightfully engrossing, charmingly and enthusiastically well-written history of the crossword puzzle tells you everything you need to know, and any number of things you couldn t have imagined, about the invention and eventual world domination of the thing that daily scratches a particular human itch: the yearning to solve a riddle, the desire to fill in a blank space, the obsession with perfection. Benjamin Dreyer, bestselling author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
Thinking Inside the Box, like the puzzles it elegantly features, is full of treasures, surprises and fun. Adrienne takes readers from Will Shortz's empire hub in Pleasantville, NY, to the pages of Vladimir Nabokov's crossword butterfly puzzle doodles, to the blistering hotel ballrooms of crossword competitions, richly bringing to life the quirky, obsessive, fascinating characters in the crossword world. You'll never think about filling in the squares the same way again. Mary Pilon, bestselling author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game and The Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete s Battle with Mental Illness
Who would ever have thought the innocent crossword would hide such an intriguing story! After reading Adrienne Raphel's beautifully researched account, full of humor and personal insight, I've come to see these puzzles in a new light, and I certainly now treat their creators with fresh respect. Professor David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
Thinking Inside the Box is a witty, wise, and wonderfully weird journey that will change the way you think. Raphel is an insatiably curious and infectiously passionate guide who plunges headfirst into the rich world of puzzles and the people who love them to reveal the fascinating acrobatics of language and the inner life of words. This book is a delight. Bianca Bosker, bestselling author of Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste
If you remember precisely where you were when you first encountered the words ETUI and ONER, I suspect you ll be enchanted by Adrienne Raphel s Thinking Inside the Box. This delightfully engrossing, charmingly and enthusiastically well-written history of the crossword puzzle tells you everything you need to know, and any number of things you couldn t have imagined, about the invention and eventual world domination of the thing that daily scratches a particular human itch: the yearning to solve a riddle, the desire to fill in a blank space, the obsession with perfection. Benjamin Dreyer, bestselling author of Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style
Thinking Inside the Box, like the puzzles it elegantly features, is full of treasures, surprises and fun. Adrienne takes readers from Will Shortz's empire hub in Pleasantville, NY, to the pages of Vladimir Nabokov's crossword butterfly puzzle doodles, to the blistering hotel ballrooms of crossword competitions, richly bringing to life the quirky, obsessive, fascinating characters in the crossword world. You'll never think about filling in the squares the same way again. Mary Pilon, bestselling author of The Monopolists: Obsession, Fury, and the Scandal Behind the World's Favorite Board Game and The Kevin Show: An Olympic Athlete s Battle with Mental Illness
Who would ever have thought the innocent crossword would hide such an intriguing story! After reading Adrienne Raphel's beautifully researched account, full of humor and personal insight, I've come to see these puzzles in a new light, and I certainly now treat their creators with fresh respect. Professor David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language
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