New York Times, Thursday, March 19, 2015

Did you notice that (1) the theme entries are entered vertically and (2) they're arranged in alphabetical order from left to right? This is supposed to mimic the actual arrangement of encyclopedia volumes on a shelf. (The sort of "extra effort" BEQ said he was championing in a response to his Ten bullshit themes post.)

The original idea for this theme came from the old "How to Hug" joke. My first thought was to have entries spanning the whole alphabet in a Sunday sized puzzle and title it FROM A TO Z. But I couldn't think of any good entries with a Z word, so I scaled the theme back.

The main trick constructing this puzzle was coming with theme entries of the form <word> TO <word> where (1) the phrase is well known, (2) the two words are in the correct order (LEFT TO CHANCE wouldn't work because LEFT follows CHANCE in the dictionary) and (3) the two words had to be fairly close together, otherwise it would be a rather thick volume (RIGHT TO WORK doesn't work because R and W are too far apart).

Once I had a set that worked, there was the problem that I needed to use lots of black squares because of the difficult lengths of the theme entries, which is why there are only 74 words in the puzzle. I got lucky to find TIM BURTON and METACOMET to cross three of the theme entries, and two good long vertical entries (JERUSALEM and MY SHARONA) to parallel two of them.

I submitted the puzzle to Will in October of last year, he said yes to it on 20 Feb, and amazingly decided to publish it less than a month later. I'm particularly grateful for this as I'm attending the ACPT for the first time in five years, and this puzzle should still be in peoples' memories. I'm guessing Will wanted to publish this while people still remember what an encyclopedia is.

I wasn't familiar with the "How to Hug" joke Todd mentioned, and all the references I found were on "blonde jokes" pages. So I'll rephrase it:

Did you hear about the USA Today crossword that took a book out of the library called How to Hug, only to discover that it was volume seven of the encyclopedia?

Zing!

While the joke didn't land for me as a crossword theme — sense of humor is so subjective — I liked the touch Todd mentioned, lining up the four "encyclopedia volumes" in alphabetical order. Good choice of themers too, all colorful phrases.

I would have liked some other tricky element for this Thursday puzzle. Although Will mentioned a few weeks ago that he has a simple goal of making Thursdays harder than Wednesdays, he's run so many tricksy Thursdays that it's set somewhat of a precedent. High expectations, and totally unfair given how hard it is to come up with innovative gimmicks, but it is what it is. Sorry, Will!

Nice layout, with TIM BURTON a nice entry and METACOMET amazing. I had no idea who this was, but what an awesome name. Overall, a nice job on filling, with a lot of good longer stuff. JERUSALEM, MY SHARONA, and ORIGAMI with its great [Paperwork?] clue.

I did experience (what I felt like was) a lot of esoteric names. Generally I don't mind a pile-up of names if they're all relatively familiar. But with SELBY, ANYA and YMA, it would have been nice to clue ISLAM and SHINS around the religion and the bones senses, so as to not add to the concentration.

Finally, a bizarrely awesome clue on ODIE. Who knew he did the Sudoku? And Jim Davis (who went to school with my mother-in-law) — HAVE GARFIELD SOLVE THE NYT CROSSWORD ALREADY! Someone come up with a lasagna / I hate Mondays / napping theme already.