THEMLESS MONDAY: [ ACROSS LITE][ PDF]
PROGRAMS: [Across Lite] [Adobe Reader]
When I started off making puzzles, back in the stone ages, I relied pretty heavily on Stan Newman’s “The Crossword Answer Book” to help me make puzzles. My grids were made 100% by hand. Just pencil paper, iron will, sweat, toil, loadsa tears, many f-bombs, more than a few heartbreaking misspellings, and erasures. Loads of erasures. Anyway, with software today it’s less messy, more efficient, and allows for quite a bit more ambitious puzzlin’. So, “The Crossword Answer Book,” man I loved that book. I cannot imagine anybody why would want to buy it unless you were making puzzles yourself. Basically, it was an alphabetical list of answers, and many multiword phrases, sorted by two locked letters in a grid. So if you had ?B??Q?? it would list OBLIQUE and OBSEQUY. I destroyed three of those books poring over them while making puzzles in the early days. Good times. Yeah, so the word list only included words three letters long to seven. Therefore, I used to make a lot of themeless puzzles with the pattern sorta similar to the one I used today because, well, you guessed it, there’s a load of seven letter entries. Enjoy the throwback.
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Share the puzzle. New one on Thursday.
> Stan Newman’s “The Crossword Answer Book”
Would you believe I found one of these in a used book pile once? It was quite interesting to see it, and ended up taking a little time thumbing through it. I didn’t end up purchasing it (probably could though if I went back to that place). For someone trying to figure things out about how to construct (me), there’s better things (heck, I even wrote something myself that does this). But it was fun to come across…
> I cannot imagine anybody why would want to buy it unless you were making puzzles yourself.
Solvers looking for hints.
Novv i recall buying several editions of the DELL Crossvvord Puzzle ansvver book decades back. Also i LOVE FIRSTIES. Only ones i see in this grid are ESVVATINI, FLYINGV, and DOVEKIE.