People have been asking if now that 6 million people have joined me in this activity, am I nervous someone will solve it before me? I have created crossword puzzles for Units 1 through 10, incorporating all key vocabulary words and some additional supplemental literary vocabulary words. S. Kennedy, whose submission happened to be opened first; the publisher awarded a “special consolation cheque” to the other solver, identified as S. Booksellers were still overwhelmed with requests for the book, and in early December, the publisher announced an additional 70,000-copy print run.

His story Death and the Compass is a great example of his use of the conventions of the detective story to examine metaphysical issues. Even if you’ve never encountered Edward Powys Mathers’s work, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with his legacy.

And then there’s the language barrier; any contemporary solver must conquer Mathers’s florid, archaic style. Born in 1892, Mathers was a highly regarded translator, a respected literary critic, and an accomplished poet, but he found his greatest success as a crossword constructor for British newspaper The Observer, a position he held from 1926 until his death in 1939.

We have many techniques for passing the hours: Theatre-Direction Bingo (works especially well on a Saturday night in the West End), Weirdest Book Title competitions and sneaky behind-the-cash-desk chess to name a few. This promotes active engagement with the material and fosters a deeper appreciation for the author’s craft. Getting half the clues in a Torquemada puzzle is good going, judging by my goes at puzzles in his two books – but you souhnd as if you know more literature.Next to the crossword will be a series of questions or clues, which relate to the various rows or lines of boxes in the crossword. is a figure of speech in which the words like or as are used to compare two apparently dissimilar items. How did the fortunes of an infamous 1934 logic puzzle become intertwined with the legacy of a famously confounding 18th-century novelist? There are millions upon millions of possible combinations, but only one arrangement of pages is correct.