We are kicking off the week with Letter Writing Inspired Crossword Puzzles.
There is a story of a Postal carrier from last year who started creating cross word puzzles – and getting paid for them! Then there is a story of where the cross word puzzle drew on “Letter writing” to help solve it from a few weeks ago.
“Posts or puzzles,
mail carrier has a way with letters” from Philly.com
“The best ideas percolate when Jules Markey walks his Center City postal route. Down and across zip code 19130, he fills the silvery stacked mailboxes of five high-rise apartment buildings on Spring Garden Street. Puzzles help Markey combat the repetition.
The other day, as he slipped an Entertainment Weekly into a mail slot on Brandywine Street, he remembered when trash served as inspiration for the first crossword of his the New York Times accepted.
A resident on his route had discarded a pile of doors by the curb.
“So I came up with a bunch of words that precede the word door,” Markey recalled. He scribbled them on postal labels stuffed in his shirt pocket. … And so the 58-year-old mailman’s first professional crossword was born. (He was paid $300.) … Click here to read the entire article.
“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.”
― Stephen Sondheim
“Letter Writing” from NYTimes.com Wordplay
“…Adam Perl asks us to pine for the LOST ARTs (39A) using “Letter writing …” as an example and while I’m all for reminiscing about the good old days when people wrote letters longhand, I’m a little sore that it took me so long to figure out what was going on in his puzzle. That’s just sour grapes on my part. When you can cram eight theme entries into a puzzle and still fill it reasonably well, that’s a very cool thing.” … Click here to read the entire article.
I’m now finding myself looking for themes of Stamps, Typewriters, and Fountain Pens in cross word puzzles too.
Here’s to enjoying our crossword puzzles – letter writing themed for extra credit!
Anchors Aweigh,
Helen
Letter Writing Inspired Crossword Puzzles Attribution & Thank you to the following who are referenced
NYTimes.com Wordplay – The Crossword Blog of The New York Times. Letter Writing by Deb Amlen July 27, 2016.
Philly.com Posts or puzzles, mail carrier has a way with letters. By Matt Gelb, Inquirer Staff Writer Posted: February 17, 2015
