This Is Not Working Out as I Had Hoped
Turns out I won't have to move to Toronto after all. Those exquisite cryptics made by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon for the National Post of Canada have been made available in book form. Mensa Cryptic Crosswords was published in October, and so, after waiting to see if anyone would make a holiday present of it (and leaving an extra month for the super-belated), I went ahead and ordered a copy.
Here they are, 65 puzzles in all, their perfection marred only by what seems to be a computer-generated typographical error with the numbering on almost every page. (I'm not sure how that could have happened since I believe these books are proofread.) Oh, how I wish one of these puzzles appeared every day in the newspaper. Yes, I know, the New York Post prints a cryptic crossword every day, but those puzzles are British, and I don't speak that language. For these, all you need is to be able to pass as a Canadian, which is a useful skill anyway whenever you travel abroad these days. Pretend that you know the Montreal hockey team is known familiarly as the "Habs." In this universe, Atom Egoyan is simply a director—as opposed to a Canadian director.
These puzzles originally appeared on a weekly basis in Canada. Theoretically, that should get me through 15 months. I'm off to a terrible start. In the week since the book arrived, I have already raced through the first seven. At this rate, they'll be done in early April. It's like asking someone to parcel out his stash of crack.
Why do I love these Cox/Rathvon puzzles so much? Stan Newman, on his crossword cruise, put it this way: "Everything they do shines." That's true, but it's not the whole story. The variety cryptics they make for The Atlantic shine, too, but in my mind they are somehow diminished by their varietyness. (Rumor has it that the Atlantic puzzles are being banished to web-only status. I'm not terribly interested in turning The Next Best Thing into the Drudge Report for crosswords, so can anyone verify if this is true or false?) Anyway, something about these generic 15x15 grids lends them a Cartesian purity, but that's not the whole story, either, since the Times magazine occasionally runs similarly constructed non-variety puzzles by, say, Richard Silvestri, which I don't get to the same degree.
In a time when every day hands us a new reason to stop loving our country as we once did, I find myself grasping at anything I can find to make this a better place to live. And so last year, at the Stamford tournament, I approached Henry Rathvon and told him how much I wished their cryptics appeared in the U.S. on a weekly basis. He looked at me if I had just spoken to him in Serbo-Croatian. After all, he's in this to make a living, and the perception exists that there will never be an appetite here for cryptic crosswords. Stan Newman reiterated the same thing on his cruise: "American newspapers will never embrace cryptics!" Of course, he also used to say the same thing about sudoku.
Here they are, 65 puzzles in all, their perfection marred only by what seems to be a computer-generated typographical error with the numbering on almost every page. (I'm not sure how that could have happened since I believe these books are proofread.) Oh, how I wish one of these puzzles appeared every day in the newspaper. Yes, I know, the New York Post prints a cryptic crossword every day, but those puzzles are British, and I don't speak that language. For these, all you need is to be able to pass as a Canadian, which is a useful skill anyway whenever you travel abroad these days. Pretend that you know the Montreal hockey team is known familiarly as the "Habs." In this universe, Atom Egoyan is simply a director—as opposed to a Canadian director.
These puzzles originally appeared on a weekly basis in Canada. Theoretically, that should get me through 15 months. I'm off to a terrible start. In the week since the book arrived, I have already raced through the first seven. At this rate, they'll be done in early April. It's like asking someone to parcel out his stash of crack.
Why do I love these Cox/Rathvon puzzles so much? Stan Newman, on his crossword cruise, put it this way: "Everything they do shines." That's true, but it's not the whole story. The variety cryptics they make for The Atlantic shine, too, but in my mind they are somehow diminished by their varietyness. (Rumor has it that the Atlantic puzzles are being banished to web-only status. I'm not terribly interested in turning The Next Best Thing into the Drudge Report for crosswords, so can anyone verify if this is true or false?) Anyway, something about these generic 15x15 grids lends them a Cartesian purity, but that's not the whole story, either, since the Times magazine occasionally runs similarly constructed non-variety puzzles by, say, Richard Silvestri, which I don't get to the same degree.
In a time when every day hands us a new reason to stop loving our country as we once did, I find myself grasping at anything I can find to make this a better place to live. And so last year, at the Stamford tournament, I approached Henry Rathvon and told him how much I wished their cryptics appeared in the U.S. on a weekly basis. He looked at me if I had just spoken to him in Serbo-Croatian. After all, he's in this to make a living, and the perception exists that there will never be an appetite here for cryptic crosswords. Stan Newman reiterated the same thing on his cruise: "American newspapers will never embrace cryptics!" Of course, he also used to say the same thing about sudoku.
posted by DO at 9:23 PM
3 Comments:
What do you think of Maltby?
P.S. I prefer C/R too (barely) but I dig the Atlantic ones more than 15/15. I had no idea that this book existed, I will order it. And I'm in the States!
Dude, you'll never make it to April if you love the puzzles that much. Devour them. You know you want to.
Frank Longo's Mensa book of cranium-crushing crosswords took me about two weeks to finish. I just couldn't help myself.
Well, since I now work for the company that published that book, I can tell you why the formatting errors weren't caught by the proofreader or editor -- it's because they weren't there until after the last time either of them saw it. Some weird glitch happened in the process of converting the images, or something (and thus we enter the realm of "magical technical things I don't understand"). Anyway, they seem to have the problem sorted out now.
Post a Comment
<< Home