Thread by @beyondwordplay

Many tributes to Stephen Sondheim (including ours!) have noted that he introduced British-style cryptic crosswords to American audiences. That's generally true... but there's a bit more to the story. 🧵 1/14

Let's go back to the birth of the crossword craze, which kicked off in 1924, when Simon & Schuster began publishing crossword books, edited by Margaret Farrar and her two less-remembered colleagues, Prosper Buranelli and F. Gregory Hartswick. 2/14

Side note: Among their other achievements, Farrar, Buranelli, and Hartswick invented the diagramless crossword when they went to lunch and forgot to bring the grid to a puzzle they were editing. Hartswick worked out the grid on the back of a menu, just from the clues. 3/14

Crossword-mania crossed the Atlantic early on, and the earliest British crosswords followed the straight-definition style of cluing. But that started to change in 1926 when Edward Powys Mathers, who used the pen name Torquemada, began "setting" crosswords for The Observer. 4/14

Mathers, aka Torquemada, gradually invented what we now recognize as standard cryptic cluing, and other British newspapers followed suit. Originally such puzzles were simply called "Torquemada style." 5/14

Torquemada's puzzles were immensely popular in the UK. In addition to setting crosswords for the Observer, he published The Torquemada Puzzle Book in 1934, which included a devious murder-mystery puzzle that was nearly unsolvable. 6/14 murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2020/11/cains-…

In 1935, Torquemada's puzzles were featured in an article in Esquire Magazine. The author? F. Gregory Hartswick, Margaret Farrar's co-editor at Simon & Schuster, the guy who accidentally invented the diagramless crossword on the back of a menu. 7/14 classic.esquire.com/article/1935/8…

In the Esquire article, Hartswick presented a puzzle from the mysterious Torquemada and explained how cryptic clues worked. Hartswick also presented his own cryptic crossword: "Mr. Tantalus of America" responding to "Mr. Torquemada of England." 8/14

The 1935 Esquire article evidently didn't spark much American interest in UK-style cryptic puzzles. It would take more than three decades for cryptics to catch on in the US, thanks to puzzle aficionado Stephen Sondheim. 9/14

In the Apr. 8, 1968 issue of New York Magazine, Sondheim noted that British cryptics were "inexplicably nonexistent in the United States apart from The Nation and an occasional Sunday edition of The New York Times," but were a true "test of wits." 10/14
nymag.com/article/2019/0…

Like Hartswick before him, Sondheim presented a British puzzle but then matched that with an American response. Sondheim constructed a variety cryptic puzzle in the style of The Listener, his favorite crossword source. 11/14

Sondheim ended up publishing more than 40 cryptic puzzles in New York Magazine in 1968-69, later collected in a 1980 spiralbound book, "Stephen Sondheim's Crossword Puzzles." 12/14
artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/16/thi…

The 1980 Sondheim crossword anthology is extremely difficult to find, but thankfully, @galenfott has collected most of the puzzles on his blog, with links to New York Magazine issues on Google Books. 13/14 blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/puttin…

So let's celebrate Stephen Sondheim's role in getting Americans interested in cryptic crosswords through the force of his winning personality and intellect, but let's not forget earlier popularizers of the form like F. Gregory Hartswick! 14/14