Dan’s Puzzle Book Roundup — Brain-Busters Edition
A lot of my recent Amazon shopping has been through their “Marketplace” used-book dealers. The price is right (usually pennies for the book plus $3.99 for shipping) and, with limited exceptions, the books have arrived in good shape and without any of the puzzles already solved. I’ve been able to pick up some out-of-print titles that way, and saved a few bucks on books that are on the shelves at Barnes & Noble.
My latest order from “Hippo Books” arrived yesterday. In the package was:
- Stanley Newman’s Cranium Crackers — a collection of 100 Newsday Saturday Stumpers, in a little book that will be perfect for subway solving.
- Random House Ultrahard Crosswords, Volume 3 — from a mid-’90s series that’s mostly Saturday Stumpers, plus reprints from something called Tough Puzzles magazine.
- Echoes of Issel: Book Two of the Saga Of The Unified Worlds, by Diane Thornley — yeah, not what I ordered. I wonder how they got this confused with Martin Ashwood-Smith’s 10-Minute Crosswords.
So today I’ll run down the hardest books in my library (excluding the two above, which are pretty self-explanatory, and I haven’t looked at them anway). And when you think “hard puzzles”, whose name comes to mind? Frank Longo.
I had thought Mr. Longo would look like Santa Claus – old, rotund, crazy-genius beard. But at the ACPT I saw a handsome, well-built man in his 30s walking around with a “Frank Longo” nametag. Wha? Brian was similarly surprised when I pointed Longo out to him. So the good news is, Frank has many decades ahead of him to construct awesome puzzles. The bad news is, he’s been spending his time lately writing Sudoku books and serving on Will Shortz’s crack team of grid doctors and fact-checkers. Longo hasn’t even been published in the NYT since 2005, though he’s had a handful of NYS stumpers in that time, and contributes to GAMES Magazine too.
Wait, more good news: his eagerly anticipated Vowelless Crosswords comes out next year. A little birdie told me these puzzles are so hard that even genius editor Peter Gordon was having trouble with them, and might have to simplify them a bit so they can be solved by people not named Tyler or Orange.
Cranium-Crushing Crosswords
Mensa Crosswords for the Super Smart: 72 Cranium-Crushing Challenges
These two books each contain 72 wide-open 15×15 grids, which increase in difficulty from “hard” to “way hard”. The second book (”Super Smart”) has an additional twist: half the puzzles are asymmetrical. This is a brilliant idea, because it allows Longo to do things like putting a quadruple stack of 15-letter answers at the top without needing a similar stack at the bottom. (Hey, experts: has there ever been a quadruple stack in a regular published puzzle?)
The secret to Longo’s cranium-crushitude is his word database, which is described in Matt Gaffney’s Gridlock as “the biggest database in crosswords”, with 720,000 words as of that book’s publication in 2006. Every place name in the atlas, every actor in IMDB, Longo’s computer can serve them up to fill a thick corner. This leads to the only downside: obscure entries that wouldn’t pass the Shortz test. City northeast of Taranto? OSTUNI. National god of the Philistines? DAGON.
Still, these puzzles are solvable, at least so far — I’m up to #60 in the second book, which I bought first, and haven’t cracked the first one yet. They sometimes take multiple sessions, but I can finish them eventually (sometimes with wrong letters, I’m not ashamed to admit). Here’s my favorite triple-stack from the book. Spoiler alert! ANGELSINAMERICA over BOOLEANOPERATOR over REGISTERSTOVOTE. And check out my favorite grid design: six 15s across, six down. Click here to see the empty grid. How cool is that?
The World’s Longest Crossword Puzzle
The 25-Foot-Long Crossword Puzzle
These two books might be the most impressive crossword-construction achievement of all time. They come in little hardbound squares which fold out accordion-style, with the answer key on the back. Each individual page has the associated clues underneath. It’s hard to describe. Brian’s talked about the 25-footer on the blog and the podcast — have you been working on it, Brian? That puzzle’s gimmick is that Hamlet’s famous soliloquy runs through it from left to right in one ginormous entry. (Actually two shorter entries and one ginormous one, because it must not have fit otherwise.)
I haven’t started that one yet, but I did solve the “World’s Longest”, which at almost 22 feet, is no longer the world’s longest since the publication of “25-Foot-Long”. The gimmick here is JFK’s inaugural address, running through the whole puzzle. Because I’m trained for speed now, I timed myself, and it took 5 hours and 35 minutes, broken up into hour-long chunks over about a week. (By way of comparison, the great Trip Payne solved it in 3:10:20, in one sitting, with four errors – I had nine letters wrong.)
Many other notable things about these puzzles. They get harder from left to right. They’re symmetrical like regular puzzles, not that you’d notice. There are no duplicated entries — an amazing feat considering the shorter one has 2,439 answers. (Then again, there are variations on the crosswordese: SST and SSTS both appear, but I ain’t complaining.) The puzzle’s sheer size from left to right allows for more extra-long entries, like KNIGHTSOFTHEROUNDTABLE and PEOPLESREPUBLICOFCHINA. And because the grid is 9 letters high, there are hundreds of 9-letter entries going from top to bottom. That Frank loves his wide-open grids! Anyway, I can’t recommend these enough. I almost don’t want to solve “25-Foot-Long” because then I won’t have it to look forward to anymore. But when I do, I’ll see how close I can come to Trip’s time of 4:16:37.
Twisted Crosswords
Terribly Twisted Crosswords
These two books are by the legendary constructor Henry Hook. I haven’t even started on them yet, but I might as well include them with the other Brain-Busters. The 72 puzzles in each pretty spiral-bound Sterling volume aren’t standard crosswords, but variants with crazy shapes and tricks. For a rundown of some of the varieties, read Orange’s review on Amazon. I’m taking these to Vermont with me this summer, along with Cranium-Crushing Crosswords, my new Saturday Stumper collection, and the book of old NYT Saturday puzzles… those should keep me busy enough for the three months I’m away from my library. I’ll see you next week with a roundup of books by Trip Payne, Cathy Millhauser, Patrick Berry, and other superstars!
