On April 10 the world’s first book of crossword puzzles appeared in stores around the country. Within days, sometimes hours, it disappeared, as ravenous fans snapped up any copies they could find and the publishers scrambled to print more. The Cross Word Puzzle Book did not introduce such puzzles to America; they had been a popular Sunday feature in the New York World since that paper printed the first modern crossword in December 1913. But by making a batch of fifty puzzles conveniently available in book form, with no need to wait a week for the next one, the Plaza Publishing Company had unexpectedly created a fad of monstrous proportions. Answers were not included in the book (they could be obtained by mail), so obsessive puzzlers besieged librarians, professors, and experts of all kinds to ask for the names of Roman emperors, Albanian rivers, and tropical beasts. Among industry insiders, however, the most frequent question was: What on earth is the Plaza Publishing Company?

Plaza turned out to be a cover name for Simon & Schuster, which had just opened its doors in January and did not want to be known as a novelty house. The proprietors learned to live with it after they sold forty thousand puzzle books, complete with pencil and eraser, in three months and almost half a million within a year. By December the fad had become a full-blown craze. The Pennsylvania Railroad printed puzzles on the back of its menus and provided a dictionary and thesaurus for stumped passengers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issued an official announcement that the ancient Roman goddess of fertility was Ops. Archeologists found something resembling a crossword puzzle on a Cretan stone disk dating from 2000 B.C. , while an antiquarian said that the ancient Hindus and Chinese had enjoyed amusements of similar nature. Curmudgeons grumbled at the puzzles’ exaltation of trivia, though some did at least give them credit for getting rid of mahjong.

Pittsburgh, for some reason, proved a hotbed of puzzle mania. The pastor of that city’s Knoxville Baptist Church made his congregation solve a biblical crossword to reveal the text for his sermon. It turned out to be an innocuous verse from Proverbs; the minister had missed his chance to preach on Jezebel, the world’s first crossword puzzler (“She wrote in the letters”—1 Kings 21:9). Soon afterward the more upright rector of the Smithfield Street Methodist Episcopal Church called solving crosswords “the mark of a childish mentality.” That same day, however, a mob of frustrated puzzle fans descended on Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum to ask its paleontologists what bird, presumably ancient, had a sevenletter name and belonged to “the sub-order of eleutherodactyli oscines.” (The answer: sparrow.) And two puzzle-solving prisoners in a Pittsburgh jail came to blows over whether “a place of punishment” should be cell or the same word with the