1st February: Crosswords

On this date in 1930 The Times published its first crossword puzzle. Here are 10 things you may not know about crosswords:

1. It wasn't the first crossword ever - that distinction usually goes to a journalist named Arthur Wynne from Liverpool, whose creation was published in the New York World paper in December 1913. He called it a "word cross" and it was diamond shaped rather than square.
2. It wasn't even the first crossword in a British paper. The Sunday Express got there first in 1925.
3. Crosswords were a big hit with readers in the 1920s. There was even a divorce case in Chicago in 1924 where a woman filed for divorce because her husband was always engrossed in a crossword. The judge ordered him to limit himself to three crosswords a day "and devote the rest of his time to domestic duties."
4. Not everyone was a fan of the crossword craze. Newspaper editors disliked them because they were difficult to print. Libraries didn't like them because, although library usage increased with people looking for the answers, it did so to the extent that often books weren't available for students. "The puzzle 'fans' swarm to the dictionaries and encyclopedias so as to drive away readers and students who need these books in their daily work, can there be any doubt of the Library's duty to protect its legitimate readers?" said the New York public library in 1925. "A childish mentality," one clergyman said.
5. Another detractor said "A sinful waste in the utterly futile finding of words the letters of which will fit into a prearranged pattern, more or less complex. This is not a game at all, and it hardly can be called a sport... [solvers] get nothing out of it except a primitive form of mental exercise, and success or failure in any given attempt is equally irrelevant to mental development." This was the New York Times, which for a long time was the only paper not to publish a crossword. However, it succumbed in 1941, feeling that people would need something to occupy their minds in wartime. Now, the New York Times Crossword is one of the most prestigious in the world.
6. Talking of wartime, there was a furore in Britain in 1944 when the solutions to a series of crossword clues in the Daily Telegraph turned out to be codenames for the forthcoming D-Day landings. The crossword compiler was suspected of being a spy and passing on secrets to the enemy and was interrogated - but the conclusion was that it was all a complete coincidence. A possible explanation was that the compiler in question was the headmaster of a school next to an army camp and the schoolboys had picked up the words from the soldiers.
7. Crossword creators are called “cruciverbalists”.
8. Roger Squires of Ironbridge, Shropshire, is the most prolific cruciverbalist. In 2007, he published his 66,666th crossword, meaning he'd come up with 2 million clues. He also holds the record for the longest word ever used in a published crossword - the 58-letter Welsh town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch clued as an anagram.
9. Other crossword records: The Guinness Book of Records lists the largest ever crossword as 7′x7′ in size, 91,000 squares and 28,000 clues. The fastest completion of a New York Times crossword was in 1996 by Stanley Newman. His time was 2mins 14 seconds.
10. Publishers Simon and Schuster owe their existence to crossword puzzles. They published the first book of crossword puzzles in 1924. It's said they did so after Simon was asked by his aunt where she could get a book of crossword puzzles. He told her there was no such thing - and realised here was a gap in the market. Their book was a runaway success. It came with a Pencil attached.