From clues to collections: A puzzle in the Library

Every Sunday morning, I would finish the crossword puzzle with my dad, picking through his leftovers. When I eventually left home, we continued this over the phone. A special and tender exchange, it occurred to me one Sunday that I wouldn't always be able to do this, so I took a note of the occasion so that I would have a record of it. Here's the last bit of our conversation.

Dad
There's only one other to get: Pavarotti's luxury item on Desert Island Discs. And it's blank I blank Y three blanks.
Me
Blank I blank Y three blanks. I don't know. Luxury item?
Dad
Pavarotti's luxury item.
Me
No, no idea Dad.

(Twenty minutes later)

Me
Hi, mum. Bicycle.
Mum
Peter! Bicycle!
Dad (in the distance)
Bicycle?!
Mum
Bicycle! How did you know that?
Me
I Googled it.
Mum
Well love, aren't you clever.
Me
Well, I just Googled it mum.
Mum
He Googled it, Peter!

Crossword puzzles aren't perhaps as old as you might think. There have been games and secret codes involving letters and words for a very long time. But the crossword puzzle as we recognise it today only dates from 1913. It first appeared on the Fun page of 'The New York World' on 21 December 1913.

Invented by a Liverpudlian, Arthur Wynne, who had emigrated to the United States, his first puzzle was in a diamond shape and lacked any black squares. Every horizontal and vertical answer had to make sense with every other horizontal and vertical. Initially expected to be a fad, they caught the public imagination.

The first British crossword puzzle (or 'cross word' puzzle as they were known to begin with), appeared in 'Pearson's Magazine' in February 1922. But it wasn't until 1924 that they truly arrived. In doing so, they changed publishing history.

Richard Simon was an American piano salesman. He met his friend Max Schuster whilst selling pianos. Then Richard got a new job in the publishing industry. Meanwhile, Richard's aunt had been developing an insatiable appetite for crossword puzzles. She asked her nephew if he knew of any books of the 'New York World's puzzles and to his amazement he discovered there weren't any. So, he contacted Max, they pooled their resources and set up a publishing company with the sole purpose of publishing crossword puzzle books.

The original print run of 3,600 sold out quickly, so they cranked their publishing house into operation, and that was that. Simon and Schuster became, and remains, one of the largest and most important book publishing companies in the world.

I was delighted to find that we have 'Cross word puzzle book series no 1' in the Library. Dating from 1924 and received via legal deposit, our copy is published by Hodder and Stoughton. But other than a few details it is essentially the same as the first half of the Simon and Schuster book and the puzzles and clues are identical. Unlike most puzzle books today, this first crossword puzzle book contains no answers! You cannot turn to the back pages and ease your mind (and nor in 1924 could you Google). No wonder Richard's aunt was hooked.

The Library has lots of this kind of publication. Crossword and Sudoku books and magazines, pop-out cardboard models and dioramas, board games. Things that involve text or illustration, but that are designed to be used, made or completed rather than read. I've often felt a little sad about them. No one plays our games. No one colours in our colouring books. They remain, eternally, unfulfilled.

And yet, this is precisely why I was able to go to puzzle number 1 in series number 1 and find the beautifully unanswered crossword puzzle all there for me to do. It was still as challenging as the day it was composed. And in that moment, the point of our collecting for preservation was laid bare. You can only complete a crossword puzzle on its page once. On completion, new meaning has been added, but its potential has been taken away.

We have other more profound examples of this in our collections, such as unopened letters to soldiers of the Great War (which remain unopened). Libraries and archives around the world, especially those that hold national preservation copies and unique items, carefully balance access with preservation. Some alterations, if made, could significantly change the meaning and understanding that the next reader might get. Crossword puzzles are an obvious example.

The 1924 book begins with an explanation to the reader as to what a crossword puzzle is, and how you complete one. I read the first couple of pages for entertainment before moving on, safe in the knowledge that I totally had a handle on how to do a crossword puzzle already and had nothing to learn. I turned to the pristine puzzle no 1, made a safe photocopy of it (as per Library protocol), closed the book, and settled down to completing it.

Puzzle 1 is 11 by 11, 121 squares in all, and only 24 are black. As with Arthur Wynne's first puzzle in 1913, there is a high degree of inter-connectedness between the answers. There is very little room for error at all. So, off we go. 1 across, 'pronoun', two letters: HE. 3 across, 'a neckerchief', five letters: SCARF. 7 across, 'exist', two letters: BE. 9 across, 'aged', three letters: OLD. This is reassuring because that has completed 1 down, 'exclamation', two letters, filling it in as HO. OLD also means that 2 down, 'fairy', three letters is EL blank, which must therefore be ELF. Is an elf a fairy? Well, it is now anyway, and it certainly was in 1924.

There's a point in a crossword puzzle, or indeed life, where you wonder if your approach is working out for the best. Your plan to be methodical totally disrupted by 11 across, 'digit', three letters. It could be TOE, but also ONE, TWO, SIX, or TEN. And further thrown by the fact that the CAR of SCARF above whatever this digit is has to also work with 4 down, pronoun, two lett…

Hang on, we've had pronoun already. That was 1 across, HE. 4 down is also 'pronoun', two letters. And SCARF also has to work with 5 down, 'plotter', eleven letters, and 6 down, 'male person', two letters (which is concerning me because that's probably HE, which we have already had for 1 across, and might also be the answer for 4 down). All of which suggests that neckerchief is not scarf.

I think about the impact of public engagement with the collections all the time. Most of this is through reading, and the impact might be emotional, or intellectual. Library collections are a shared resource for everyone to use, and many of our items are irreplaceable. We aim to protect use of the collections from physically altering them. But it happens occasionally when someone asks for "bolts to be cut".

When books are made, the large sheets of printing paper are folded in sections and then trimmed to create individual pages. Every so often, the sections (bolts) miss the cut, and so the book is produced with a run of a few pages that are still folded and can't be opened for reading.

Unless the uncut nature of the bolts is integral to the meaning of the artifact (such as an artist's book, or a book that demonstrates the development of book manufacture) we nearly always carefully cut the bolts in our conservation workshop. This enables the point of the book to be fulfilled: every page was supposed to be read.

32 across, 'moved rapidly', three letters: RAN. 33 down, 'incline the head', three letters: NOD.

Some of our board games have cards or playing pieces that are still "un-popped-out". I often think of them as being like uncut bolts. To engage fully with (or, if you will, "read") the board game, you need to be able to play it.

I don't feel the same way about crossword puzzles. Engaging with the puzzle fully requires completing it, which means that it cannot be done again by someone else. Popping out the pieces of a board game, however, enables someone else to play it afterwards (although it also increases the chance of pieces getting lost or stolen). While it's preserved in its original form it can always be theoretically played. If preservation is removed, and parts are lost, the game is over. This is philosophical stuff and there are no easy answers.

Speaking of which, 1 across, 4 down, and 8 down all have the same clue which is 'pronoun'. All have two letters, and the clue for 28 across, two letters, is 'personal pronoun'. Not only is 'exist' the clue for 7 across, two letters, but it's also the clue for 36 down, two letters. The clue that's really missing here is how many of these answers are the same?

Because of the previous neckerchief-digit impasse, I did what any sensible person does with a crossword. I looked at the menu of clues for the ones I could actually do. 'River in Italy', two letters: PO. 'Owners', eleven letters: PROPRIETORS. PO and PROPRIETORS gives me PRY for 24 down, 'peer'. Which in turn revealed that one of the 'pronouns' was YE. And because 'sorrowful' is SAD, 'pale' is WAN, and 'to move on' is GO, I have revealed that 'Jacob's seventh son' is GAD. This is not an answer I would ever have got if it wasn't for the concentration of connected white squares in these early crossword puzzles.

Again, as in life, a confident but wrong answer can play havoc. So many clues dangling in the air because 17 across, 'bivalves', seven letters, turned out not to be MOLLUSC after all but MUSSELS (it would have been MOLLUSCS anyway, so that was my own aggravating fault). But bit by bit I filled the puzzle in.

Then I need to call for help. Not my mum, but Elaine and Sarah in the office next door. Sarah got SENATES ('legislative bodies'), Elaine got MAPLE ('tree') and LARCH (also 'tree'). 'Part of boot' was UPPER and 7 across, 'exists', turned out not to be BE but was actually AM. The other 'exists' at 36 down was BE. (So glad we used a pencil.) The rest started to fill itself in. Even 11 across, 'digit', which we now knew to be TOE because of the O from 5 down, 'plotter', which turned out to be CONSPIRATOR.

Which just left 3 across, 'neckerchief', five letters. Blank blank C blank blank. I gave in and Googled it.

Me
Ascot! It's ASCOT. It's a men's silk cravat thing. Ascot.
Elaine
It can't be, because 6 down would be OE. 'Male person'. OE?
Me
And 4 down 'pronoun' would begin with S. Well, it's a dud puzzle then. I Googled neckerchief and that was the only 5 letter option apart from scarf.
Elaine
Unless some of these clues are wrong…But if 4 down ends in T is it maybe IT.
Me
And 'male person' must be HE then.
Elaine
So neckerchief is blank I C H blank.
Sarah
It's FICHU.
Me
What? How did you know that?
Sarah
I Googled it

And indeed, it was. The answer to 3 across was FICHU. If I had bothered to read the introduction, I would have seen that to help people get started with puzzle number one they had talked readers through the first few clues, including neckerchief. The answer was there all along, on page 14, long before Google. By gad.

A crossword puzzle reminds me of the interconnectedness of things. At every scale, letters, words, books, concepts, libraries – they all link in some way, just as atoms and people and events do. As we navigate through the clues and challenges, sometimes the answers are right in front of us, waiting to be discovered. And as in life, the journey of solving the puzzle is often as meaningful as the solution itself. It certainly passes the time.

Graeme Hawley is the Head of Published Collections at the Library and he loves puzzles. He is interested in "everything" as a concept; is fascinated by the replication of certain designs in nature, physics and relationships; would have loved to have gone on a train journey with Victoria Wood and Barry Cryer; and thinks that the Library is the most profoundly moving building in Scotland because it is the single best evidence in the country of the endlessly creative skill of the human species.