“This means that every part of the puzzle is connected with every other part.

Farrar’s requirements for an acceptable puzzle? “First, that it be what’s called an allover interlock,” Mrs. Among the Times’ regular contributors are a high-school principal, an advertising man, and an actress a good many puzzles also come from inmates of penitentiaries, who presumably have plenty of time on their hands. Farrar as “constructors.” They work on a free-lance basis, and are paid twenty-five dollars for the large Sunday puzzle and ten dollars for the small dally puzzle.

The Times puzzles are sent in by people known to Mrs. books keep coming out I’ve just finished editing the eighty-second, to be published this summer.” Our three children were no longer babies, so I accepted, and I’ve been here ever since. In 1942, the Times decided to start a Sunday crossword puzzle, and asked me to be editor. “In 1926, I married the publisher John Farrar, and when our children started coming along, I gave up my newspaper-puzzle work and limited myself to editing the books, which Simon & Schuster published at the rate of two a year. “For a while there, I was busy day and night constructing puzzles,” she said. Farrar lighted a cigarette and shook her head in wonder as she recalled those days. Quickly emerging from behind their alias, Simon and Schuster, as Simon & Schuster, brought out two more crossword-puzzle books, both compiled by Miss Petherbridge as the year ended, total sales of the three books reached three hundred and fifty thousand copies. It was an instant success, forty thousand copies being snapped up in the first three months. As a selling gimmick, a freshly sharpened pencil was attached to each copy of the book, which sold for the then substantial price of a dollar thirty-five. By the time the puzzles were ready, Simon and Schuster had begun to doubt the pulling power of puzzles, and to avoid the risk of beginning their corporate existence with a flop, they brought out the book under an alias-the Plaza Publishing Company. They arranged to pay Miss Petherbridge and two colleagues seventy-five dollars for assembling fifty puzzles. In 1924, a couple of ambitious young men named Simon and Schuster, having made up their minds to start a publishing house, hit on the idea of bringing out a collection of unpublished Sunday World puzzles. A., an early crossword-puzzle fan, often called public attention to these errors in his famous column “The Conning Tower.”) Miss Petherbridge proved so good at preventing errors that she soon became the unofficial crossword-puzzle editor, and was even permitted to try her hand at making puzzles. One of Miss Petherbridge’s duties was to see that the puzzles appeared without typographical errors, which had long been a vexation to readers. Farrar, then Miss Petherbridge, and newly graduated from Smith, got a job as secretary to John O’Hara Cosgrave, editor of the magazine section of the Sunday World. The present square shape and pattern of black-and-white squares, as well as the reversed name, were developed before 1920, when Mrs. It scored a mild success, and the puzzle was made a regular feature of the paper. It was shaped like a diamond, had no black squares, contained thirty-two words, and was called a word-cross puzzle. That honor goes to one Arthur Winn, an editor of the old New York Sunday World, in which, on December 21, 1913, the first crossword puzzle appeared. Farrar, who gave us to understand at once that she was not the inventor of the crossword puzzle. We stopped in at the Times shrine the other day and had a pleasant, reminiscent chat with Mrs. Probably the most important person in the world of the crossword puzzle is a slight, charming sixty-one-year-old woman named Margaret Farrar, who helped launch the craze in her youth and is currently the revered crossword-puzzle editor of the Times.

Like mah-jongg, which came along a bit earlier, crossword puzzles might have been expected to suffer a sudden and permanent loss of favor when the force of the craze had spent itself instead, they have endured and prospered, and though they are not much talked about nowadays, they continue to have their millions of ardent addicts. It was exactly thirty-five years ago that the great crossword-puzzle craze began to sweep this country. Margaret Farrar, the first crossword editor for the Times, in 1968.

Crossword light pioneer