Word Ways: Making the Alphabet Dance (Part One). (2024)

When I was a boy, wordplay took two forms: solving puzzles created byother people, and solving puzzles proposed by Nature (for example,searching for all words having a specified property). I was attracted toboth of these, but more strongly to the latter; this chapter describesthe particular forms these enthusiasms took. My first game with Naturewas brought to my attention by my father. What (he asked me) is thelongest word that spelled the same both forwards and backwards? I rathereasily found such words as ROTOR, LEVEL and MADAM, as well as thesix-letter proper name HANNAH. The best I could do were the seven-letter REPAPER, REVIVER, ROTATOR and DEIFIED; my father claimed to knowan eight-letter example but he had forgotten it. I also recognized thewordplay in a neon sign for Ewart's Restaurant in downtownWashington which selectively illuminated various letters to spell outthe message EAT AT EWART'S.

When recovering from scarlet fever in the hospital at Camp Lee inthe spring of 1946, I had much time on my hands. I observed that EERIEand QUEUE were two five-letter words with four vowels, that STRENGTH wasthe longest one-syllable word, and that the five vowels were present inMATE-METE-MITE-MOTE-MUTE.

On a December evening in 1949, Faith and I sat in the ManagersParlors trying to see how many sets we could discover with three wordsspelled differently but pronounced the same. We came up with

 right, rite, write to, too, two sight, site, cite sear, sere, seer aye, eye, I pear, pare, pair four, for, fore rapt, rapped, wrapped knew, knew, gnu air, ere, heir rays, raze, raise or,. oar, ore meat, mete, meet flu, flue, flew buy, by, bye cent, scent, sent soul, sole, sol there, their,they're due, do, dew aisle, isle, I'll 

Later I noticed that WRIGHT could be added to the first set, and in1970 Stefan Burr of Bell Telephone Laboratories showed me PRAYS, PREYS,PRAISE, PRASE. I liked the two- syllable examples best:

 idol, idyll, idle sensor, censor, censer pallet, palate,palette faro, pharaoh, farrow carrot, carat, caret burro, burrow,borough 

At the Analytical Research Group in Princeton, Forman Actonintrigued me by asking what combination of initials had the smallestambiguity--that is, from what set of initials could a person's fullname be predicted with the greatest confidence? The answer wasF.X.O'B, Francis Xavier O'Brien. After Princeton, my interestin wordplay oddities continued at a low level. I discovered that SEQUOIAwas the shortest word in the English language with all five vowels (inFrench, OISEAU is even shorter). Another interesting discovery was thefact that Job, Polish and Tangier were three words which changed theirpronunciations when the initial letters were capitalized. And thevarious pronunciations of the letters OUGH in bough, cough, trough,ought, hiccough, through, though and enough fascinated me. Later I notedthat OMB terminating a word could have three different pronunciations,as in bomb, comb and tomb.

The words BIBLE, ATLAS, GOOSE and THIGH are used as a mnemonic in acard trick. These four words consist often pairs of letters, each ofwhich can be identified by specifying the word or words in which thepair appears. For example, G is the only letter appearing in both GOOSEand THIGH, and A the only letter appearing twice in ATLAS. I devised acorresponding mnemonic for fifteen pairs of letters in October 1964:LIVELY, RHYTHM, MUFFIN, SUPPER, SAVANT. I sent this to Martin Gardner,the Mathematical Puzzles editor of Scientific American magazine, and wasgratified to receive a postcard in reply: "I knew the Bible, Atlas,Goose, Thigh set; but your Lively, Rhythm, etc. is new & very good.Many Thanks. Perhaps I can work this into one of my columnssometime."

My first word-related research project of any magnitude was thecompilation of a type-collection of words containing different trigrams(three consecutive letters in a word). For several years I had idlyconsidered the trigram EBU, believing that the only words containing itwere zebu, rebus and ebullient. In 1962 or 1963 Marvin Epstein, aco-worker at Bell Telephone Laboratories, pointed out that camouflageand genuflect were the only two words in the English language with thetrigram UFL.

On February 12 1964 I purchased Fletcher Pratt's Secret andUrgent (1942) in a second-hand bookstore on Fourth Avenue in New York.In an appendix he listed the number of times each of 2510 differenttrigrams had occurred in a sample of 28834 trigrams in English prose.Much intrigued, I decided to find a word illustrating each one ofPratt's rare trigrams. I started this project on February 29 1964and with Faith's aid worked on it in the evenings for severalmonths that spring, and again in the late fall. By December 15 we hadgone once through the alphabet. In late January and early February of1965 I typed up the dictionary which ran to 57 pages and 5840 trigrams,more than twice Pratt's number.

It was clear that my list would never be complete; by April 1966 mytrigram count stood at 6064. In addition, I found commoner words forexisting examples, such as figure instead of iguana for IGU, andstraight for aiglet for AIG. At the end of 1965 I filled in words forthe 500 or so commonest trigrams which I had previously ignored. Faithgave me many trigrams, and others helped as well: Lois with taXIIng,eYEIng, beAUIng, harveSTTime and laMPPost, Peggy with taCTFul, Mary Loiswith rUFEscent, my father with BAMboozle, and Marvin Epstein withscuLPTor and sovereiGNTy.

There were 24 trigrams listed in Pratt for which I had no word: ACF,AHY, BAJ, BLL, DLL, DRT, EBC, ECW, EDV, EWJ, EWV, EYV, GYO, HSC, KUT,NIW, NLS, NTV, PPM, PPT, SFC, SNP, WJE and WYO. Clearly he had allowedproper names such as Leahy and Wyoming, and abbreviations for Parts PerThousand and Parts Per Million. It also looked as if he had omitted theintervening space in New Jersey. Why did EWJ appear four times and WJEbut once?

In late 1965 I applied mathematics to wordplay for the first time: Ibecame interested in the problem of estimating how many random trigramsone would have to sample in English prose before finding N differentones. I used two mathematical models, a simple one of my own, and a morecomplex one borrowed from the Ph.D. thesis of John W. McCloskey, whom Ihad interviewed for Bell Labs employment while on a recruiting trip toMichigan State University in December 1964. My model used Pratt'sstatistics to predict that 417 new trigrams were typically found eachtime the sample size was doubled--to find 6680 different trigrams 30million trigrams would have to be examined! (McCloskey's model,however, suggested that only 15 million would be needed.)

In 1967 I combed the 5th and 7th editions of Webster'sCollegiate Dictionary for additional trigrams, and found severalhundred, raising the count to more than 6500. I wrote a three-pagedescriptive introduction and submitted this with a sample trigram pageto McGraw-Hill for possible publication. They turned me down, suggestinguniversity presses or a government publication. In December 1968 I wrotethe Follett Publishing Company who had issued a pocket dictionary ofanagrams a few years earlier, but they weren't interested either.It looked as if my project would never see wider dissemination.

What use was all this? I found the major justification of my manyhours of work in the creative act itself, and in the convenience ofquickly checking whether or not I had a trigram which I ran across in myreading. It seemed possible that the book would appeal to logophiles,cryptographers and crossword puzzle fans, to say nothing of Super-Ghostplayers. I reckoned that I had the largest trigram collection in theworld outside the secret files of the National Security Agency.

It was also in the 1960s that I developed an interest for wordplayinvolving personal names. In July 1969 Lois observed that my first twonames sounded like the word albatross. Quickly picking up on this, Iobserved that my full name was Albatross Heckler, obviously a synonymfor an iconoclast or a ridiculer of sacred cows. Some years later,Philip Cohen found a better soundalike, Raw Szekler, the latter worddefined in Funk & Wagnalls Unabridged as a "Maygar mountaineerof Transylvania". In September 1966 I tried anagramming my name,but the best I could come up with for Albert Ross Eckler was LACKERRORLESS BET. In January 1971 I discovered that my most plausibleanagram to another name was ROBERT CASS KELLER; I often wondered if thisanagrammatic twin existed. Noting that I had sixteen letters to playwith, I tried without success to make a four-by-four double word square.The best I could do was get six out of eight words into it, oralternatively imbed it in a larger crossword puzzle using eleven extraletters. The second square had the intriguing property that the lettersof ROSS were permuted along the main diagonal, the letters of ALBERTwere all above the diagonal, and the letters of ECKLER, below.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

At Bell Telephone Laboratories I amused myself by anagramming thename of the guest of honor at occasions celebrating marriage, retirementor transfer. When Bob Piotrowski married Audrey Johnson in February 1966I produced from their surnames HOW KISS? JOIN PRONTO, which gained addedsignificance when she produced a baby about six months later. When NaomiBograd Robbins left the Labs in January 1967 to have her first child, Iimitated Ogden Nash:

 Some Advice Concerning the Demeanor of the Guest of Honor at a Farewell Luncheon, And the Optimum Number of Guests to be Invited Grin, or sob; I'd ban a mob. 

I imbedded name anagrams in doggerel verse when Ed Krauth retired inFebruary 1970, again when Alexis Lundstrom retired in April, and finallyfor Jack Nadler's departure to AT&T in June:

 In 46 years of Labs work Have you watched ten ice-creamsodas No task did ED KRAUTH ever shirk Made by a busy drugstore clerk? A career yet finer When Jack's processingAT&T data Exists in Asia Minor We all say: this LAD CAN JERK! For there he could aim for HEAD TURK. As a canoeist, Ed never gets wet; Waving aloft the broken bottle, Out skiing, he's seldom upset. Jack cried "I LACKJAR END!" With mechanical cunning With such a lethal weapon He keeps ancient ears running Can one a JACKAL REND? And when playing violin--HARK! DUET. 

A Telstar Fable:

 One MUST END AXIS ROLL by plugging the hole; SMALL ROUND EXITS are bad (too expensive to pad); By budgets I'm vexed; I SUM DOLLARS NEXT. 

Much later I revived this talent. In the 1996 dedication to DmitriBorgmann in Making the Alphabet Dance, I anagrammed his name four waysin a doggerel verse. When Susan married Jerry Kerns on October 16 1999,I embedded seventeen words containing the letters ECKLER-KERNS in anEpithalmial Ode, in the form of a soliloquy by Jerry the girl-watcherabout Susan the statistician:

 I KEN the SCENE: her NECK I SEEK. What ELSE is SEEN? her KNEES so SLEEK (don't LEER!). A CLERK SERENE, she KNEELS by CREEK. Her job so KEEN? Counts ELK that REEK (don't SNEER!). 

I volunteered to recite this as part of a toast at the reception,but wiser heads prevailed and more conventional toasts were offered byJerry's and Susan's older sisters instead. My only otherlinguistic joke about sons-in-laws involved the observation that mydaughters hadn't married any Tom, Dick and Harry, but instead (inthe same order) Tom, Rick and Jerry.

In the Mathematical Games section of the December 1967 ScientificAmerican magazine, I read that a quarterly journal devoted torecreational linguistics called Word Ways was to be launched byGreenwood Periodicals in 1968. The editor was Dmitri Borgmann, alreadywell-known to me through his two books Language on Vacation (1965), alarge collection of word oddities such as palindromes, reversals,transpositions, anagrams, word squares, words with curious letterpatterns and so forth, and Beyond Language (1967), a mixed bag of 119problems based on wordplay, geography, history and esoterica. Inaddition, he resurrected the obsolete word LOGOLOGY from the OxfordEnglish Dictionary, proposing it as a synonym for wordplay, and coinedthe word LOGOLOGIST to describe one who studies the letter- patterns andsound-patterns of words.

Although impressed by Dmitri's exhaustive and scholarlyresearch, my initial reaction to his work was that he was much too readyto admit obscure words or proper names as illustrative examples.Sometimes, too, I felt that his examples of logology had been stretchedto the limit. For example, Problem 49 asked what common property wasshared by MEDUSA, EUCLID and HERALD but by few other words. I looked invain for some letter-property that could be deduced by logical thought,and finally had Faith check the answer. It turned out these wereacronyms for pieces of electronic hardware, a finding of littlelogological significance.

Still, the idea of a magazine devoted to wordplay intrigued me, andI promptly sent in my $9 subscription. Within a month or so, it dawnedon me that here was an outlet for logological research. Whycouldn't I write up word problems which interested me and submitthem to Word Ways for publication? During most of March 1968 I workedhard on an article which I titled "Word Groups With MathematicalStructure". This article was inspired by Problem 122 in BeyondLanguage which exhibited the word set ADO BAR ORE BOY YEA BED DRY, usingseven different letters repeated three times apiece, to form seven wordswith two interesting properties: every pair of words share exactly oneletter, and each possible pair of different letters appears in exactlyone word. I discovered that word sets such as this were closely relatedto Balanced Incomplete Block Designs used by statisticians for assigningdifferent treatments to experimental material (I had, in fact, given atutorial on this topic when I was in graduate school at Princeton). Bynot requiring that both properties be simultaneously present, Idiscovered many additional such word sets. The following two suffice toshow the flavor of the investigation: in YEA PER YET PAY PRY TAP ARE RATTRY PET, each possible pair of the six different letters AEPRTY appearsin exactly two words, and in OGLED GRAPE POISE GRIDS PLAID SOLAR everypair of words share exactly two letters.

Problem 26 in Beyond Language placed OLARECIN in a circle andconstructed words out of each set of four adjacent letters: ORAL REALCARE RICE NICE COIN LION LOAN. I demonstrated that this could beachieved for many other letter sets and word lengths, up to tensix-letter words. In fact, when the word length is only one less thanthe number of letters around the circle, one has a special case of theword sets previously discussed. (later I learned that this had beenknown for over half a century, and was called a BaltimoreTransdeletion). My example exhibiting ten nine-letter words: STERCOLINRELATIONS CONTRAILS CONSERTAL CREATIONS SECTORIAL LARCENIST SECTIONALCROTALINE CENSORIAL. Finally, I included the LIVELY MUFFIN RHYTHM SUPPERSAVANT word pattern I had sent Martin Gardner a few years earlier.

I sent this article to Dmitri Borgmann, along with a one-pager onthe Francis Xavier O'Brien problem. I was gratified by his promptreply "Both of [these articles] are eminently suitable forpublication, and written in excellent English ... you may expect to seeyour contributions in future issues of Word Ways." The articleappeared in the November 1968 issue of Word Ways.

My eye was caught by the article "Dudeney's SwitchPuzzle" in the first issue of Word Ways. Consider a horizontaltrough which has room for exactly twelve square wooden blocks. At theposition of the tenth block, this trough is intersected by a verticaltrough of the same length. If the wooden blocks are placed in thevertical trough, the tenth block is again at the intersection. Supposethat a twelve-letter word is written on the blocks in the horizontaltrough; how many moves does it take to transfer the word to the verticalone? (A "move" is defined as the sliding of one block anydistance within the troughs, including turning the corner.) Dudeneynoted that the minimum number of moves (obviously 12) was achieved byINTERPRETING. Dmitri found that if the intersection-point were shiftedto the eleventh block in both troughs, the words

 Maria had a little sheep, In Maria's class it came atlast, As pale as rime its hair, A sheep can't enter there; And all the places Maria came It made the children clap theirhands, The sheep did tail her there. A sheep in class, that's rare! 

To my surprise, Howard even accepted for publication the trigramdictionary, running most of it in the August and November 1969 issues.As a result of this article I learned that Philip Cohen, a Cornellstudent, was embarking on a similar project but allowing almost anywords, including proper names.

Faith soon became interested in my logological activity. When inApril 1969 I acquired from Ed Gilbert of Bell Labs a computer-generatedlist of all tetragrams known to be in Webster's Second Edition, shequickly discovered that there were at least four words in Webster'swith three consecutive identical letters: -OSSSH-, -ESSSH-, -ALLLE-,-CEEER-. I soon discovered headmistreSSShip and waLLLess, but the othertwo baffled us, and were later proven to be the hyphenated formboSS-Ship and the misspelled whencEVEr. This was published in theNovember 1969 issue with the catchy title "On Searching For Three-LLamas", alluding to Ogden Nash's doggerel verse.

I was amazed by the explosive growth of my interest in logologicalresearch. Howard's letters and the articles in Word Ways stimulatedme to investigate new subjects almost every month. My latent interest inwordplay had been awakened, and I foresaw a long and pleasant careergenerating logological articles for Word Ways. To aid in my work, Ipurchased my first unabridged dictionary, a second-hand copy ofWebster's Second Edition from a Portsmouth, Maine dealer for $75 onJuly 5 1969. (A year later I bought a battered copy of Webster'sFirst Edition at the New Vernon firemen's auction for only 50cents!)

In early August 1969 I was dismayed to receive a letter from Howardsaying that Greenwood had reluctantly decided to cease publishing WordWays at the end of the year because of financial losses--about $30,000over a two-year span. This deficit could be erased only by a 50 per centincrease in the subscription price, which Greenwood felt would lose manyof its readers. The real surprise came in Howard's August 29letter:

 Would you be interested in publishing and editing a journal of logology? I myself am in absolutely no position to attempt such a thing, but possibly you could put it over. Greenwood doesn'thave anything to sell, so far as I can see, except the name Word Ways and the subscribers list which is between 4- and 5-hundred. You could change the name and not pay them a dime. I could send you the piles of scripts that have been sent to me. As to the subscribers list, well, I have a copy of it, which is a very lucky thing, and I would gladly send you this. Please let me know if you like this thought or consider it feasible for you. If not, I plan to ask, one by one, a number of other contributors. Someone might just do it. I ask you first at least partly because it seems to me that there is an advantage in the fact that you and your wife could reinforce each other in the undertaking, I'll hold off approaching anyoneelse until I hear from you. 

My first reaction was--me, editor and publisher of a journal?You've got to be kidding! But the more I thought about it duringthe following week, the more attractive it became. The financial burdencould be considerably lightened if I prepared camera-ready copy using anIBM Executive typewriter with proportional spacing, which I was on theverge of purchasing second-hand for $240 in order to prepare the Ecklergenealogy during the coming winter. A hasty conference with SENSUOUSNESSand LEVITATIVELY (his coinage) were also minimum-move. Howard Bergersonanalyzed the problem for different word-lengths and switch positions,discovering that a minimum-move word must have a pattern consisting ofan arbitrary letter sequence, a palindrome, the same letter sequence,and (optionally) a second palindrome. I found that the pattern of apalindrome, a letter sequence, and the same sequence repeated would alsowork. I introduced a notation for specifying all possibilities. Forexample, there were 44 switch word patterns of length 12, four of whichswitched on the tenth letter, satisfying Dudeney's original puzzle.Try as I might I was unable to find any other twelve-letter switchwords. To assess the difficulty of the task I looked for examples of allpossible shorter switch words. I found all 8 of the five-letterpatterns, ROTOR ONION DEEDS BELLE AMASS CEDED CACAO LLAMA, but only 7 ofthe 11 six-letter patterns, or 11 of the 20 eight-letter ones. Myanalysis appeared as a letter to the editor in February 1969.

I was flattered when Dmitri asked me in 1968 to contribute to histhird book, Curious Crosswords. I sent him three, one numerical and twologological, but my euphoria turned to annoyance and chagrin when noneof them appeared in his book, issued in 1970. In early 1969 Dmitri triedto enlist my help to analyze the combinatorial aspects of a tie-breakercontest puzzle, involving the selection of words from a list so that aspecified number of As, Bs, etc. were included. I replied that he wasdealing with an allocation problem best approached using a computer. Heproposed that we form a team to share the profits from solving contestpuzzles, but I demurred, pointing out that I was not a computerprogrammer and furthermore could not "borrow" time on BellLabs computers for frivolous investigations. For several weeks Dmitribombarded me with letters urgently requesting improvements to hisproposed solutions, but I perhaps cured him of this tactic when Itelephoned him collect with a suggested solution.

I was quite surprised when a letter from Howard Bergerson inNovember 1968 revealed that he had replaced Dmitri as Word Ways editor;Dmitri had said nothing about this in his many letters to me. Monthslater, I learned from Howard that Dmitri resigned when GreenwoodPeriodicals refused to pay him an editorial salary of $5000 per year.When Howard, recruited by Joseph Madachy, the editor of anotherGreenwood journal, agreed to be editor without salary, Dmitri angrilywrote him to say that he considered Howard's action "extremelyhostile and downright treacherous" and would never hear from himagain. (I later learned that Dmitri had resigned in a huff a few yearsearlier from the National Puzzlers' League when they didn'taccept his various suggestions for change.) Apparently he was a pricklypersonality with an exaggerated sense of his own importance.

Howard asked me about my logological interests, and suggestedpossible topics for me to research and write up for Word Ways. I workedon a dictionary of word-pairs differing in a single letter (for example,VALVE and VALUE); with help from Dmitri I found Websterian examples forall 325 possible pairs. Again aided by Dmitri, I prepared an articlelisting uncapitalized words containing various arrangements of thevowels AEIOU, such as EUphOrIA, fAcEtiOUs, bEhAvlOUr. I first becameaware of Darryl Francis, a British college student and ardent logophile,when Howard sent him my manuscript and he came up with numerous wordsDmitri and I had overlooked. Eventually, after a computer search of atape containing Webster's Second Edition, 109 of the possible 120arrangements were found.

I indulged my lipogrammatic interest by paraphrasing the poem"Mary Had a Little Lamb", omitting in turn the letters,A,E,T,H and S, and finally eliminating half the alphabet:

Mary Had a Lipogram 

Compton Press revealed that they would print 200 copies of a 64-pagejournal, 7 by 10 inches in size, for $312, with additional 100s costing$30. Second-class postage would come to 14 cents per issue. I decidedthat I would have to reduce the price somewhat because the journal wouldhave a less-professional format (no right-justified lines, and a singletypeface); tentatively I decided on $6 per year. Allowing 50 extracopies for future orders, it appeared that I could break even if I had asubscription list of 250, half of Greenwood's.

I feared that if I said no that no other word-buff would attempt thetask, and I would always wonder whether I had evaded a challenging andinteresting opportunity. It would be a shame to see all the work insetting up the magazine, finding subscribers and authors, go to waste.More importantly, I believed strongly that the existence of Word Ways asa forum for the exchange of logological information was of vitalimportance. Without it, logologists would work in a vacuum and be farless stimulated to carry on investigations.

I wondered, of course, how much time it would take. Obviously,leisure time formerly devoted to genealogy could be diverted to logologyafter I had finished typing the Eckler genealogy, a task that, witheffort, would be done by the end of 1969. Word Ways would offer aplausible excuse for resigning my National Speleological Societymembership committee job, one that held little interest for me.Fortunately, the work could be conveniently divided, with Faith handlingthe subscriptions and mailings, and I the editorial correspondence andthe typing of articles. The latter would not take too long, but Iwondered whether I would be able to answer all the letters I received.Further, I wondered whether there would be enough material flowingin--would I end up writing Word Ways as I had written Speleo-Theme fiveyears before? It was painfully evident that most of the first year ofWord Ways had been written by Dmitri, and a significant amount of thesecond year by Howard.

One thing appealed to me very strongly--the concept of being at thecenter of an information web, of knowing the latest logologicalresearches sooner than anyone else. More significantly, I regarded WordWays as a potential psychological life preserver. In contrast to themurky ambiguities of my department head work at Bell TelephoneLaboratories, I viewed the editorship as a chance to contribute directlyto the advancement of knowledge and to the mental stimulation andentertainment of at least a small part of society.

I would have preferred to try my hand at editing a logologicaljournal during my retirement, when I would have much more free time.Yet, opportunity was knocking now, not fifteen or twenty years hence,and I could not ask it to wait. At the end of a week, I said yes--andwas launched into a new and higher level of activity in this absorbingpastime.

At once I had an important decision to make: should I start a newjournal, perhaps called the Journal of Recreational Logology, usingHoward's 1968 Word Ways subscriber list, or should I purchase thename and the current list from Greenwood? Despite Howard's adviceto have as little as possible to do with Greenwood, I finally decidedupon the latter as the lesser risk. I feared that Greenwood mightdiscover that I was using their old subscriber list, and I felt thatsubscribers, especially libraries, would be much more likely to continuewith a journal they had already elected to buy, than start afresh with aprivately-issued journal of uncertain pedigree.

Before making this decision, I wrote Greenwood on September 21asking whether it would be possible for me to insert a notice in theirfinal Word Ways issue advertising a new journal. Director ChristopherPrice replied on September 25 that this could be arranged, but, anxiousto salvage something from the wreckage, strongly urged that I purchaseWord Ways instead. A telephone conversation revealed that he thought$600 a fair price for the name, cover plates and subscriber list, butnot the stock of back issues. I countered with an offer of $500 which heimmediately accepted.

I naively assumed that Greenwood would fade out of my life as soonas the subscriber list and cover plates had been transferred. How wrongI was! To begin with, Greenwood was so slow in delivery (mid-January1970) that Word Ways was much delayed in notifying subscribers of thenew price. Greenwood was also very slow in forwarding Word Wayscorrespondence. Once they sent a package of 20 or more inquiries,checks, address changes and the like up to five months old! Sometimesthey forgot to endorse checks over to Word Ways; when the checks weresent back for signature, they were never returned to me. Finally, WordWays had to ask the affected subscribers to reissue checks to usinstead. In September 1970 Greenwood decided that the 1968-69 Word Waysinventory was using up valuable warehouse space, and invited me to makean offer for it. After some dickering, I purchased 240 copies of each ofthe eight issues for $350, about 18 cents apiece. Although I mailed thecheck on September 29 1970, it wasn't until mid-February 1971,after many letters and telephone calls, that the final box arrived.

I decided that I would raise the price of the journal to $7, still$2 less than Greenwood charged, in order to cover these additionalexpenses. It was well that I did so, for I soon learned that the vastmajority of library subscribers did not deal with a publisher directly,but through a subscription agency which charged a 10 per cent middleman fee for handling their many magazine renewals. Thus, I would not receive$7 but $6.30 for many subscriptions. Furthermore, a later visit toCompton Press revealed the unpleasant fact that a more accurate estimateof costs was $450 for printing 500 copies, with additional 100s for $39each.

Howard assured me that there would be no problem with contributions,and backed this up by sending me a number of unpublished manuscripts,the best being a set of twelve from Darryl Francis who had previouslynever had an article published in Word Ways. Dave Silverman, whose,recently introduced Kickshaws column I much admired, wrote to offersupport:

 ... who needs these big city Philistines, who probably couldn'tcare less about philomania, I beg your pardon, logophilia. All we need is an iron man to continue it under the old title or otherwise. That's why I was particularly pleased to know that you are atleast considering taking on the burden of editorship. If any support from me is needed consider it an axiom that I will help to lighten the burden in any way I can ... Hell, I don't have to flatter you,old boy; you know that your contribs have been the best part of the issues in which they have appeared ... It would be lovely if we could make a success of Word Ways on our own. And I believe we can do it. Especially if you don't permit anyone to ride hishobbyhorse from issue to issue to the point of ennui ... 

I was delighted to have Dave continue as Kickshaws editor, for hehad a knack for selecting a variety of interesting topics and a gracefulnarrative style that I wished I could emulate. His one sin was that ofprocrastination; more than once, I had to send him an anxious letterasking where Kickshaws was as the deadline approached. I was dismayedwhen, in 1975, he asked for a sabbatical as Kickshaws editor. To fillthe gap starting February 1976, I asked other authors to contribute aguest column until I could identify a worthy successor. One never camealong, however, and eventually I decided that the guest column was agood idea worth keeping. I visited Dave in his bachelor home in West LosAngeles in February 1973. On a later trip in April 1976, I telephonedhim from my hotel room in Westwood, three miles away, hinting that itwould be nice to get together again. To my puzzlement, he evaded thisproposal but spent four or five hours on the phone chatteringenthusiastically on a variety of logological subjects. Something wasamiss, but I didn't realize that it was manic-depressive psychosisuntil I heard from Mary Hazard on a Los Angeles visit of Dave'ssuicide by gunshot in February 1978.

At the time of his death Dave left a large file of logologicalmaterial which he once had intended to use in Kickshaws:

 The backlog of K material I have is staggering ... If I took 3 days vac. & pulled all the phones out of their jacks, I could retireto my home office, where I can't hear the doorbell when my tapedeck is playing, & get off 80 pages of unpadded K contribs ... if Iadd my own stuff more than 800 pages. I have boxes and legal size letter fileboxes crammed full of notes on K. 

How was I to get my hands on this treasure-trove? I wrote hismother, offering a home for his logological material, but she neveranswered, and by discreet inquiries some years later among Dave'sLos Angeles friends I learned that it had apparently been destroyed byhis distraught and grief-stricken family.

I used guest Kickshaws editors for thirteen years. In 1988 I askedDave Morice to become permanent Kickshaws editor, and he assumed thisjob with the February 1989 issue. He had discovered Word Ways in 1985after purchasing a copy of Word Recreations, and was captivated by themagazine. Almost immediately he expressed interest in contributing toKickshaws, and I tried him out as guest editor in August 1986. Anillustrator, poet and editor of small literary magazines, Dave had led asomewhat hand-to-mouth existence since his graduation from St. LouisUniversity in 1969. Much interested in promoting awareness of poetry tothe layman, he conducted Poetry Marathons at public arts festivals,including such stunts as 1000 poems in twelve hours, a mile-long poem,and a poem stretching across the Delaware River. He conducted workshopswhich encouraged senior citizens to write poetry, and in 1981 generatedPoetry Comics, classic poems illustrated by cartoon drawings. In 1988 hesent blank wooden nickels to a wide variety of celebrities, invitingthem to create a drawing or pithy saying. Since I approached logologywith the mindset of a mathematician, I felt it important to complementthis with logology viewed through the eyes of a humanist. Dave wasinterested in all aspects of logology, and made sure that tidbits fromreaders were included in Kickshaws. His one fault wasprocrastination--Kickshaws material would usually arrive the last day ortwo before my deadline to send copy to the printer.

To promote reader response to Word Ways articles, I inaugurated thecolumn Colloquy in the February 1970 issue. Any reader wishing tocorrect or add to an article in one issue could send in his comments upto a month before the next issue was sent to the printer, and be surethat it would appear in this column. Generally I typed Colloquy a day ortwo before copy went to Compton Press. I hoped that this rapid responsewould be one of the more attractive features of the new journal, insharp contrast with the lengthy publishing delays under Greenwood (myreply to Dudeney's Switch Word Puzzle took a year to appear). Tofurther promote the interchange of ideas, I introduced Query, apage-filler at the end of an article, asking readers if they knew theanswer to an unsolved logological problem. However this never caught on,and I dropped it after writing most of the queries myself. In 1971 Iintroduced a column devoted to competitive word games which I calledLogomachy. In the first column, Darryl Francis contributed a Scrabbleproblem, and Mary Hazard promoted Correspondence Crash. In this game,the object is to determine your opponent's five-letter target wordby firing five-letter shot words at it. Each time you fire a shot word,you are informed by your opponent the number of times the shot word hasthe same letter in the same position as the target word (for example,the shot word cRUeT scores three against the target word tRUsT).Logomachy ran from February 1971 to February 1973, by which time I wasthe Correspondence Crash champion and new games had been added such asUncrash, where the object was to be the last person to add a word to alist that did not crash with any of the earlier words. A longer-livedfeature was the Poet's Comer, begun in May 1974 and repeatedwhenever I had a sufficient number of logopoetic tidbits to warrant areappearance.

Acting on a suggestion by Dmitri, I began in November 1973 to insertlogological fillers at the ends of articles Eventually these were mostlyused for book reviews (I received free copies from many publishers,notably the expensive reference books of Gale Research Company) and fora Buy, Sell, Trade column where I offered second-hand copies of books Ihad picked up cheaply in old bookstores.

Dmitri Borgmann was easily the most important contributor ofarticles to Word Ways from 1970 to 1985. When I took over the magazine,I felt it was essential that Dmitri, the best-known name in logology, bea contributor once more (he had, of course, sent in nothing duringHoward's term as editor). I proposed that he be an editorialcollaborator with the responsibility of preparing a regular column ofhis own choosing, for example a survey of logological literature, but hewas unwilling to tie himself down. However, he was willing to writearticles.

Dmitri's articles were generated in fits and starts. He sent inseven at once, which I was able to use during the first year of myeditorship. In November 1972 he sent in a flood of articles, and in July1973 about 30 more, including a number under pseudonyms such as MerlinX. Houdini IV, Jezebel Q Xixx and Ramona Quincunx so that I couldpublish more at one time. In 1978 he became enamored of the problem ofcompiling a set of transpositions for the chemical element names, andbombarded me with letters updating his researches for several months. Ithen heard very little from him until the summer of 1984, when anothertorrent of articles arrived--so many, in fact, that I decided the onlyway to handle them was run an all-Dmitri issue in February 1985.

In the field of logology Dmitri was a unique phenomenon, producingwell-written articles across the entire field of logology--there were noothers combining his breadth of research and writing skills. He knew hewas good, and did not hesitate to remind the reader of this fact. Ilearned that my best strategy as editor was to cater to his monumentalego by praising the quality and quantity of his submissions. As aconsequence, he redoubled his efforts to produce articles for Word Ways.Most Word Ways readers seemed to like his material, though a few, suchas Philip Cohen and Mary Hazard, complained about his Muhammad Aliposturings and his outrageous criteria for allowable"words".

Was it all a pose, designed to enliven logology? I thought if Icould meet him face to face I could decide whether it was a put-on, butDmitri was a very reclusive man. When I wrote him in early 1979 that Iwould be visiting Pacific Northwest logologists that summer, he wroteback "That excludes me--I am not a logologist". I took this asan oblique invitation to stay away, and did so. Much later, I heard ofPrince Djoli Kansil's experience along the same lines: he hadarranged by phone to meet Dmitri in Oak Park, Illinois at a certainhour, but when he arrived at Dmitri's house no one was there. Infact, the only Word Ways subscriber who ever met him in person was DavidMcCord, who came to purchase Dmitri's collection of geographicalreference books.

It was hard to believe that Dmitri was joking about his logologicalomnipotence, for most of his humor was rather ponderous. He sent in anarticle on the word LITE, twitting Word Ways for using a word notsanctioned by any dictionary (even though this was what he habituallydid). For several years his letters were sent under a variety of weirdletterheads having nothing to do with him, and were adorned withMad-Magazine-like gummed labels. One of his most scholarly articles, athree-part one on the Safer square and the history of palindromes, cameto me under the name of David Russell Williams, a NationalPuzzlers' League member recently mentioned in Word Ways. In anotherletter he parodied the note on Fermat's Last Theorem: "I havefound a rather marvelous collection of 600 additional such names, butthis margin is too small to hold it." His most startling attempt athumor was somewhat macabre:

 March 27 1978 Since today is my last day, I am making a point of getting this letter off to you before the impenetrable mists of eternity engulf me forever. April 24 1978 I have returned from the dead--but only briefly... May 26 1978 With certain death from radiation poisoning staring me grimly in the face, I doggedly plod on toward my approachingdoom. May 27 1978 Curious notes found in the effects of one who sacrificed his life in the cause of advancing logology. 

This culminated in a notice saying "Your putative correspondentwas, by order of this Court, executed on March 27 1978, at 12:00Midnight, for the crime of murder in the first degree. As provided byMontana law, he was hung. Accordingly, you could not have received anycommunications from him subsequent to the specified date."

Once I attempted to refute one of Dmitri's grandiose claims inthe pages of Word Ways, but he refused to accept the outcome. InNovember 1973, writing under the Jezebel Q. Xixx pseudonym, Dmitriclaimed that nowhere near 1169 really good anagrams (the number cited inHoward Bergerson's book, Palindromes and Anagrams) had ever beencreated. In a letter he further asserted that he could create a dozensuperb anagrams per day indefinitely, all having the quality soconspicuously absent in published examples. I invited Dmitri to submit aset of ten anagrams of such quality, and obtained ten others from recentissues of the Enigma, the National Puzzlers' League monthlynewsletter. His were

 INFERNOS non-fires TANGERINES satin-green SEXUAL INTERCOURSE relax, ensure coitus ARGUMENTS must anger CHRISTIANITY 'tis in charity STREET SHOES hose testers BEHEADMENTS deathsmen be WEIRD NIGHTMARES withering dreams MURMURING WINOS rum? rum is now gin YE SMEARS are messy 

The Enigma ones were

 MS. STEINEM smites men GLACIERED large-iced WOMEN'S LIBERATION men rib as we toil on PRIMATE trim ape VERSATILITY variety list DIPLOMACY mad policy PUGILIST tip: I slug LEMONADE demon ale REFURBISH I rub fresh ARMAGEDDON mad god near 

Mixing these examples, I asked nine male Ph.D.s at Bell Labs, ninesecretaries at Bell Labs, and seven female Filipinos living in theUnited States to rank them in order of appositeness (how well therearranged letters captured the thought of the original). Dmitri'sanagrams ranked below the Enigma ones, so much so that there was only asix per cent chance that a result this extreme would have occurred ifthe two sets of anagrams were of equal quality. Not surprisingly, Dmitriassailed the results on the grounds that the panel was ill informed tojudge anagram quality. Would he have questioned their competence had hisanagrams come out on top?

I had heard rumors as early as 1979 from Howard Bergerson, whooccasionally talked with Dmitri's wife, Iris, on the phone, thatDmitri was grossly overweight and suffered from some type of heartcondition which had caused him to pass out. Still, I was unprepared forKyle Corbin's phone call in early January 1986 that Dmitri had diedof a heart attack on December 7 1985. I had been planning a secondall-Dmitri issue for February, but quickly converted this to a memorialinstead. Fortunately, I had enough articles on file, including twocomplete sets of Kickshaws, to plan two more all-Dmitri issues forFebruary 1987 and February 1988, the latter date the twentiethanniversary of the founding of Word Ways. The Father of Logology wasgone! A certain vibrancy was gone from logology as well.

I did not realize just how strange Dmitri really was until Faith andI visited his widow and son in Dayton, Washington in the summer of 1988,ostensibly to see whether or not she had any unpublished logologicalmaterial of his. We discovered that Dmitri valued his privacyhighly--most of the windows in his house were boarded up or the shadespulled down so that no one could look in. He refused to have the grassmowed because this, too, increased his seclusion. Even the glass in thedoors between rooms within the house was covered with boards or drapes,so that one could not see from room to room. He carried on a long feudwith a nearby church, threatening legal action because the pealing ofits bells intruded on his privacy.

Iris told us that Dmitri would not permit mirrors in his home, andavoided looking in them on the rare occasions when he was outside thehouse because he feared the persona that he believed was staring back athim from the other side of the glass. Once, a few months before hisdeath, he inadvertently caught sight of himself and stood transfixed,moaning "I'm old-- I'm incredibly old." (He was then57.)

Dmitri's desire for privacy extended to his work in progress.When his son Keith would ask him what he was working on, Dmitri wouldreply "Go away, don't bother me. You wouldn'tunderstand." After he had exhausted the supply of typists inDayton--27 in succession were either fired or quit--Iris did histyping.

Although Dmitri came across as having a colossal ego in hiscorrespondence, Iris believed that in reality he had an enormousinferiority complex. He refused to learn how to drive a car because hebelieved himself incapable of coordinating hands and feet. Despite histraining as an actuary, he was "terrified" of numbers. (I hadoften encountered his contempt for mathematics in our correspondence.)He was wildly jealous of anyone having a higher IQ than his (155,according to Iris).

Iris believed that Dmitri's paranoia was traceable to boyhoodexperiences. Born in Hitler's Germany to a Lutheran father and aJewish mother, he was raised as a nominal Christian and came with hisparents to the US in the mid-1930s. His mother, severely crippled, wassubject to ridicule by neighborhood children.

Dmitri had been in poor health for a number of years, suffering fromobesity and a form of angina peetoris. Yet he refused to follow hisdoctor's instructions or take his prescribed medication. His greatpassion was candy bars, which he would sneak down to the comer store topurchase; after his death Iris and Keith found boxes of empty candywrappers in his room. (He hoarded other things as well--cases of soda,job lots of hair shampoo, and the like.) He opposed any attempt tostraighten out the household clutter, and even the routine noises ofhousekeeping such as a vacuum cleaner were an aggravation. After awhile,Iris abandoned any attempt at house cleaning; she intimated that hisembarrassment over the deteriorated condition of the house was the realreason Dmitri had refused to see me in 1979.

Toward the end of his life Dmitri didn't come downstairs veryoften, and rarely shaved or dressed. He ate and slept when it suitedhim, working feverishly and secretively on his logological research.Keith reported that often weeks went by when he never saw hisfather.

A couple of hundred books from his library were stored in the livingroom, mostly specialized dictionaries. We were curious about the patchesof duct tape placed on the spines and on the title pages of manyreference books. It turned out that Dmitri had shamelessly stolen thesebooks from libraries, the duct tape concealing the libraryidentification. This was confirmed by David McCord who found that anumber of the references he bought from Dmitri were the property ofvarious libraries.

One of Dmitri's more curious undertakings was setting himselfup as the chief guru of the Divine Immortality Church. He awardedhimself a bogus doctorate in theology, had stationery printed up, andadvertised in various magazines offering theological degrees and acabalistic drawing for a substantial price. Keith estimated that perhaps100 people signed on. Was this some sort of tax dodge? Keith believedthat his father was sincerely trying to come to terms with life'sgreat questions--yet Dmitri encouraged magazines such as Hustler to omitthe first T from the church name in his ads!

No other Word Ways author, save perhaps Darryl Francis and RalphBeaman in the early 1970s, Leonard Gordon in the early 1990s, and MikeKeith in the late 1990s, approached Dmitri Borgmann in breadth andfecundity. Far commoner was the author who had a single logologicalinterest reiterated in the material he submitted: WalterShedlofsky's anachuttles, David Stephens' ever-longerpalindromes, John Ogden's phrasal anagrams (be the case =beteaches), Kyle Corbin's Scrabble game records, LeonardAshley's quizzes, John Candelaria's large-number nomenclature,Paul Maxim's analysis of Mallarme for historical allusions, BobLevinson's Jotto sets (five five-letter words containing 25different letters), Bill Webster's stories replacing each word by atransposal (hyte nickled tumbrels = they clinked tumblers), JerryFarrell's word games based on graph-theoretical and combinatorialmodels from mathematics. All these had to be metered out in small dosesin Word Ways, lest I violate Dave Silverman's cautionary advice.Some authors were really off the wall: Henry Burger'sprivately-published Word Tree tried to reduce all verbs to variousmixtures of some 30 basic concepts, and John Weilgart's Language ofSpace attempted much the same thing with nouns. My philosophy was toencourage new authors, even those with a single interest, in the hopethat they would eventually branch out as did Jeff Grant, who wasoriginally interested in palindromes alone.

Occasionally I found it necessary to extensively rewrite acontribution with a good idea clumsily expressed, such as LeslieCard's article on geographical place names or MurrayGreenblatt's article on the sequence TO, ThE, FaiR, FlukE, ...mimicking the integers TwO, ThreE, FouR, FivE... However, I graduallyrealized that the diversity of author styles was one of the charmingfeatures of Word Ways; I didn't want a hom*ogenized publication suchas Reader's Digest or Scientific American in which all articleswere written in much the same style. Most authors didn't mind myediting, and some even thanked me for a job well done. Dmitri was, ofcourse, the exception, writing such blasts as "Not acceptable. Killthe rejoinder entirely!! My texts are published, unchanged or not atall!" or "Any article on the subject which chose to omit theenclosed list--in its entirety, unaltered--would be so far removed fromthe spirit in which the project was undertaken that it would have toshow the editor's name as its SOLE author!!!" Confronted bymessages like these, most editors would have probably told Dmitri to gojump in the lake, but I obediently published the items in question,reasoning that I wanted to keep the pipeline open for futurearticles.

I did not have the money to spend on typographical niceties likeGreenwood. The IBM Executive Typewriter served me adequately for anumber of years, even though I found the task of threading a newone-time ribbon somewhat exacting. The quality of the print graduallydeteriorated (small r was especially poor), so I purchased an OlivettiET 221 electronic typewriter for $1500 which gave me the choice of fontson daisy-wheels (I selected Venezia) and right justification of lines.The first issue in the new format was May, 1983. When I bought my firstcomputer from Tom Day's brother John in 1989, I should haveconverted to computer operation, but I resisted change and didn'tmake the switch until the Olivetti itself was becoming increasinglyunreliable and expensive to maintain. The first computer-generated issuewas August 1995; and all articles from that date onward were stored onthe hard disk in my computer.

Article titles were typed on a large-type Remington used by theSecurity Department of Bell Labs at Whippany for the preparation ofemployee badges. This typewriter was eventually retired to a back roomwhere I was its sole user. Later it was returned to the office machinespool for reassignment, but no one wanted an ancient manual typewriteranymore. I left a note on it asking that I be contacted first if theyever disposed of it. When I learned that unwanted machines weredistributed free to charitable organizations, I arranged through Faithto have the Richmond Fellowship and St. Peter's Church ask for it.However, these requests were never honored. I couldn't purchase themachine because Bell Labs rules prohibited the sale of surplus equipmentto employees. In 1991 a department head in the office machines areasigned a slip of paper at last enabling me to carry the machine away,but it was shortly superseded by a Brother P-Touch labeler Faith gaveme. This in turn was retired when I went to computer preparation.

One problem I was never entirely able to solve was that ofproofreading the camera-ready copy. No matter how often I looked at it,misprints slipped through. Even after my electronic typewriter enabledme to review a line on the display screen before committing it to thetypewriter, I could not get rid of all of them. Spell checkers weretedious to use because Word Ways had many words not in theirdictionaries. Few people seemed bothered, although Kyle Corbin, JeffGrant and Dmitri Borgmann usually sent me errata lists for theirarticles.

I continued to use Compton Press for printing until it suddenly wentbankrupt in 1991. After an abortive attempt to have a small firm at theintersection of Route 46 and 287 take over, I transferred the printingto Bookmasters, a firm in Ashland Ohio which was so much cheaper thanCompton that I could afford the added cost of having the finishedproduct shipped to Morristown.

When I first took over Word Ways, I guessed that there might be tenthousand people willing to subscribe to the magazine, if they could onlybe told about its existence. There seemed no easy way to reach them,however. In the spring of 1970 I tried small classified ads in theSaturday Review and the Atlantic Monthly, which barely paid forthemselves. A brief notice in the newly-established British magazineGames & Puzzles in 1972 was equally worthless. Would a larger ad bebetter? We learned that the English Journal, published monthly by theNational Council of Teachers of English for high-school teachers, wouldrun a full-page ad for $190. In the late summer of 1972 we took thisplunge, but the result was a disaster--only three or four peoplesubscribed.

The best publicity for Word Ways has always been mention innewspapers, magazines and books. Although the first two are ephemeral,the third can generate a small steady flow of inquiries for many years.The first mention of Word Ways, a major one, occurred in HowardBergerson's Palindromes and Anagrams, published by Dover in 1973.Word Ways' address was given in the Introduction, and mycollaboration with Howard on Voeabularyelept Poetry (the construction ofa new poem out of the alphabetized word-list of an existing poem) wasdescribed in considerable detail in one chapter.

In the May 1972 Word Ways I reviewed Willard Espy's new book,The Game of Words, and sent him a copy of the issue in the hope he mightsubscribe. I heard nothing until a few days before Christmas when Faithreceived a telephone call from his wife, Louise, in New York City askingif we could send her the entire set of back issues as a Christmaspresent! He mined these assiduously for material for a future wordplaybook, and on June 16 1973 he and his wife came out to Morristown fordinner so he could show us his manuscript. My principal criticism of itwas that it was a mixture of two incompatible themes, examples ofwordplay from many published sources, and reminiscences of his ancestralhome in Oysterville, Washington. The latter was later excised from thebook and expanded into a genealogical memoir, Oysterville: Roads toGrandpa's Village. I was delighted with the many references to WordWays scattered through the manuscript, culminating with an encomium andsubscription information in the August 3 entry. The book, An Almanac ofWords at Play, was published in 1975 and sold more than 100,000 copies;over the years dozens of Word Ways subscriptions resulted from it. Hefollowed up with Another Almanac of Words at Play in 1980 whichdidn't repeat Word Ways' address but used material from 32different Word Ways authors on 37 different days. He always asked forpermission beforehand and I was delighted to give it to him--it pleasedWord Ways authors by giving them wider exposure, as well as keeping thename of the magazine before the public. In 1982 he created anotherspinoff, A Children's Almanac of Words at Play, again with WordWays references. In 1983 he dedicated Word Puzzles to us:

 The Eeklers let words know who is boss. That is why I dedicatethis book to Faith and Ross Eekler, editors of Word Ways, with abidingadmiration 

The book consisted of rhymed word puzzles based on word ladders(love-lave-late- hate) and transdeletions(a-at-tag-gate-stage-grates-stagger).

We visited the Espys twice at Oysterville, in the summers of 1979and 1988 while on vacation trips out west, and occasionally in New Yorkas well. The last time I saw him was in November 1998, after attending aballet performance at City Center; by then he was largely confined tobed but could still carry on an animated conversation. He died at theage of 88 on February 20 1999, only a few months before the Almanacswere reissued in a combined volume, The Best of An Almanac of Words atPlay, which once again gave subscription information.

Willard Espy introduced Word Ways to Gyles Brandreth, who wrote TheJoy of Lex in 1980 and More Joy of Lex in 1982. He acknowledged his debtto that "endlessly instructive and entertaining journal" inboth books. Much of the material in the second book was supplied byDarryl Francis. Brandreth was especially charmed by my lipogrammaticrewrite of "Mary Had a Little Lamb". a work also reprinted inHerbert Kohl's A Book of Puzzlements in 1981 and TonyAugarde's The Oxford Guide to Word Games in 1984. All but Augardeincluded subscription information as well.

In January 1982 Paul Dickson, alerted by Maledicta editor ReinholdAman, wrote to ask me for a list of synonyms for "intoxicated"in Word Ways. Dickson explained that he was assembling the world'slargest collection of such synonyms, one of the chapters in hisforthcoming book, Words. I sent him a list of six names Faith hadpublished from The Boozer's Diary in the February 1979 Kickshaws:been elephants, brained, one-over-the-eight, banjaxed, miffy, newted.Later he sent me the full list of 2231 words and phrases. I believe thiswas eventually recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records. As forhis book, Paul thoughtfully included the address of Word Ways at the endof his bibliography, and this, too, was a source of subscriptioninquiries.

Tom Pulliam, an occasional Word Ways contributor, joined with GordonCarruth to compile The Complete Word Game Dictionary published in 1984.The Preface contained the address of Word Ways together with theflattering comment

 Perhaps you are a true logophile--one whose interest in words extends well beyond the confines of any single word game. You and others like you are blessed with a quarterly publication of specialized appeal, Word Ways... It is subscribed to, and read voraciously, by many who relish the appearance, spelling, derivation, sound, use, and peculiarities of words and word forms. 

The book was earlier published in 1977 under the title The CompleteScrabble Dictionary. However, Selchow and Righter successfullyprosecuted the publisher for wrongfully appropriating the Scrabble name,and succeeded in having the book destroyed before it was distributed.Tom Pulliam sent me one of the few surviving copies, so that thisrepresents one of the rarest books in my collection.

In a sense Martin Gardner was the founder of Word Ways, for hesuggested the idea of such a magazine to Greenwood and proposed DmitriBorgmann as its first editor (Dmitri had earlier supplied Martin withmuch material for the appendix to the Dover reprint of Bombaugh'sOddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature published in 1961).During the years that he wrote the Mathematical Games column inScientific American magazine, he was a staunch friend of Word Ways,endeavoring to give subscription information about us every couple ofyears. I can recall at least four: November 1970 (a cryptographicproblem by Walter Penney), April 1974 (a Lewis Carroll whimsy), February1977 (a discussion of OuLiPo, the French group devoted to literarywriting under constraint), and February 1979 (the first verse ofPoe's "The Raven" written automynorcagraphically,hom*oliterally, and heteroliterally). The first of these mentionsresulted in a surge of 30 subscriptions. Later ones had less impact,perhaps because there were few Martin Gardner readers who had not seenthe earlier one. As Faith pointed out more than once, one of thedifficulties with the publicity that Martin generated for us was thefact that the wordplay being illustrated was not a central part of WordWays. This was especially true in the case of the Lewis Carroll item, asmost of the people who subscribed dropped out a year later.

In October 1984 Faith and I visited Martin Gardner inHendersonville, North Carolina, when we were considering that area as apossible retirement locale. A friendly and unassuming man despite histowering reputation in many fields--magic, pseudo-science, philosophy,mathematical recreations--he took us out to dinner and spent a couple ofdays driving us around the area. (Afterwards, Faith carried on a livelycorrespondence with him about his religious beliefs.) In 1993 his manyfriends and colleagues instituted the invitation-only "Gatheringfor Gardner" in Atlanta, consisting of three-day meetings at whichpeople presented papers relating to Martin's interests andexchanged handouts. I was invited to the Second in 1995 and the Third in1998, but did not actually attend one until the Fourth Gathering inFebruary 2000, when I presented a paper on "Coincidences" andissued a handout challenging the others to identify 18 differentconstrained versions of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" (two peoplesent me partial solutions).

In 2006 Martin Gardner began working on a wordplay book based onmaterial from many sources (including readers) collected over thedecades, but the Colossal Book of Word Play was not published until fouryears later, shortly after his death on May 22 2010 at the age of 95.Jerry Farrell reported that the book was to be dedicated to me, andindeed it was!

 To Ross Eckler, for his books on advanced wordplay and for his distinguished career as the editor of Word Ways, the world's leading journal of recreational linguistics 

Like Willard Espy and Martin Gardner, Richard Lederer has been astaunch friend of Word Ways. He first discovered us in 1976, while anEnglish teacher at the prestigious St. Paul's School in Concord NewHampshire. He soon became a regular contributor of articles, mostlyrelated to puns or language use. Seeking wider horizons for hislogological interests, in 1981 he began writing a weekly column on wordsfor a Concord newspaper. This led to other newspapers, radioappearances, and in 1987 Anguished English, the first of a series ofpopular books on language misuse, puns, and the like. In 1997 hiswebsite said that his books had collectively sold more than one millioncopies.

As Rich's fame grew, he added lecture tours to his repertoire.In 1989 he resigned from his teaching post at St. Paul's to devotefull time to recreational linguistics. I saw him in action in June 1995when he invited me to a lecture in Maplewood. A spellbinding lecturer,he captivated his audience, who afterwards purchased copies of his bookswhich he had brought along with him. In June 1996, we visited him at hisConcord home in conjunction with a visit by Dave Morice and his sonDanny. His first book devoted to letterplay was The Word Circus,published by Merriam-Webster in 1998. Dave Morice was the illustrator,and, to my surprise and delight, the book was dedicated to us:

 To Ross and Faith Eckler, for teaching the world the ways of words and making the alphabet dance 

Scot Morris, a senior editor of Omni magazine who wrote a games andpuzzles column for them, invited me to lunch in New York on December 101981 to discuss a forthcoming column, The World's Hardest WordQuiz. This appeared in the February 1982 Omni along with subscriptioninformation, but few inquiries came in.

I wondered whether publicity showing the full breadth of Word Wayswould be better for attracting subscriptions. This theory was put to thetest in the May/June 1981 issue of Games Magazine, when editor WillShortz devoted two pages of his Pencilwise column as "A Salute ToWord Ways":

 Hidden Opposites ("shun poet" becomes open-shut) Geographical Link-O-Grams (identify the city Los Angeles from the clue--SANG----), Contronyms (to trim means both "to cut off" and "toembellish") Reversible Word Ladders (spas-seas-sews-saws-saps) The Word Watcher's Test (what is unusual about words like dermatoglyphics? verisimilitude? cookbook?), Fl-Flavored Words (words beginning fl-having the meaning of"light" or "downy") Transdeletion (anticeremonialist, nonmaterialistic, recitationalism, reclamationist, remastication, cremationist, creationism, remication, manticore, reaction, certain, retain, train, rant, tan, at, a) 

I was very pleased with the variety of examples and waited forsubscriptions to roll in from the 600,000 readers, but I wasdisappointed, for there was no subscription surge in the three weeks orso after the magazine appeared. The May 1986 Games Magazine featured acolorful two-page spread on "The Games Book of Word Records"for which I was paid $600. With Will Shortz's help, I selectedextreme examples of wordplay involving the largest word-square (JeffGrant's 10-square), longest lipogram, longest isogram, longestanagram, highest-scoring Scrabble moves and games, shortest pangram,longest list of non-crashing five-letter words, and longest palindrome(David Stephens' 58795-1etter "Satire: Veritas"). Againthere was little response, perhaps five to ten subscriptions and aletter offering an improvement to the pan-crashing word set.

For a couple of years Games Magazine published a monthly spinoff,The Four-Star Puzzler aimed at the word puzzler. The September 1982issue listed Word Ways subscription information along with several othermagazines, and the February 1983 issue featured Faith and me in theongoing "Who's Who in Puzzledom" series, together with anarticle I wrote on eight constrained versions of "Mary Had a LittleLamb".

When Will Shortz became the co-host of a Sunday morning program onNational Public Radio, he occasionally proposed listener competitions ofa wordplay nature. For several of these he passed along all the entriessent in by readers which I sorted out and made into Word Ways articles.The four I remember most clearly were: write a sentence using only twodifferent consonants, write a word-unit palindrome, write a sentencewith as many consecutive identical words as possible in it, andconstruct an apt mini-review of a movie title. I believe that he alsomentioned the existence of Word Ways on these programs. In November 1993Will Shortz was appointed Crossword Puzzle Editor of the New YorkTimes.

For the sake of completeness I mention one othercirculation-building device which Word Ways tried. In late 1973 or early1974 1 obtained a copy of the membership list of a professional societyof linguists. I sent 100 names on this list Word Ways advertisingflyers, and another 100 names sample back issues in excess supply ininventory, to see which method was more effective. Neither one workedwell; we received only three or four subscriptions from eithermethod.

What were the results of this long struggle for new subscribers?When we started in 1970, we had approximately 310 subscriptions, splitmore or less evenly between libraries and individuals. After we obtaineda second-class mailing permit in 1974 we were required to reportsubscription information each year. The following data show a steadyerosion in subscriptions after 1978:

 1974-79:359,341,375,496,513,469 1980-89:470,445,458,443,396,401,383,422,384,373 1990-99:347,314,319,295,263,270,270,250,260,253 2000-06:206,187,182,165,158,150,134 

In addition we sent out about five issues by first-class mail toimpatient overseas subscribers.

As circulation manager Faith worried about several things. Shereminded me that should Word Ways drop below 200 paid subscriptions oursecond-class mailing permit could be revoked, which would force us tosend copies by first class mail, adding four or five dollars per year tothe subscription rate (however, this never happened). She also worriedabout the increasing cost of a complete set of back issues of Word Ways,which by the year 2006 had grown to some $400, a price she felt was outof the range of most people. I was worried about the gradual buildup ofback issues in the basem*nt. These were first stored in cardboardcartons on the floor, but this eventually became unwieldy to access, andabout 1990 Susan's boy-friend John Hornyak built a rack to holdthese boxes along the garage wall from floor to ceiling, and also alongthe stairs. By the year 2000 we still had all back issues in printalthough several had fewer than 50 copies and one was down to 17.However, the total inventory was rather overwhelming at more than 10,000copies!

Not surprisingly, rising costs of printing and postage forced us toraise the subscription rates frequently: $8 in 1975, $9 in 1980, $12 in1982, $14 in 1985, $15 in 1988, $17 in 1990, $20 in 1995, $25 in 1997and $30 in 2003. The 1997 increase was due to a 25 per cent increase inthe number of pages per issue starting with August 1996, from 64 to 80.Still, the subscription increases failed to compensate for the loss ofsubscribers, and for the last few years of Word Ways it was necessary tosubsidize it with a couple thousand dollars each year.

I soon realized that Word Ways was never likely to grow much largerthan 500 subscribers as long as it occupied the niche I had originallydefined for it: a forum for the exchange of ideas among those trying toadvance logological knowledge. If I wished to act less like a scholarlyjournal and more like a mass-entertainment magazine such as the FourStar Puzzler, I could undoubtedly boost circulation, but then I would beediting Word Ways not for fun but for money. If the articles publishedin Word Ways did not overlap my own logological research interests, whatpoint was there in editing it? Why chair a dialogue that didn'tinclude my work?

Was I falling into the trap of most scholarly journals, that ofbecoming more specialized and less readable as time went by? My fathercertainly thought so, as he claimed that he could understand few of thearticles any more, mine being especially obscure. I found moredisquieting Tom Kurtz's note in his 1984 Christmas card "Theword articles are getting obscurer and obscurer ... Maybe I'mslowing down!" (He later let his subscription lapse.)

Starting in 1980 Word Ways experimented with the publication ofmonographs in addition to the regular magazine. During the 1970s WordWays published a number of palindromic poems by David Stephens, a NorthCarolina physician. In June 1977 he sent me a giant palindrome 5000words long entitled "Satire: Veritas" purporting to be asampling of manuscripts on the desk of Giles Selig Hales, the editor ofan avant-garde literary journal, ready for mailing to a friend namedEton Harrison. While this palindrome, like all long ones, had littleoverall coherence, it did contain a great number of puns and otherwordplay, and managed to introduce much typographic variety. During thenext several years he added to it until it eventually totaled more thanten thousand words (more precisely, 58,795 letters). I found thepalindrome much too long to consider publishing in Word Ways, and couldnot interest Dover Publications. In March 1980 he offered $500 to helpdefray the cost of printing the palindrome. I decided to offer it as aWord Ways Monograph, soliciting advance orders on the back cover of theMay 1980 issue and a classified ad in Verbatim magazine; Will Shortzmentioned it in the July/August 1980 issue of Games as well. The advanceorders were so few (19) that I decided to print only 100 copies for $433and set the price at $5. I delivered 20 of these to David Stephens whenFaith and I visited him in October 1980, along with the receipts for 29copies sold through Word Ways. Over a decade or so the copies wereeventually sold.

We didn't try the Monograph series again for a decade. In 1991,I used my recently-acquired computer to assemble a set of 8876 anagramsand antigrams drawn from "Anagrammasia," a collection drawnfrom early puzzle publications by Newton B. Lovejoy of the NationalPuzzlers' League in 1926, augmented by the best ones in the Enigmasince that time. Each anagram occupied a single line on the page, of theformat (two digits--year of later publication), as in

 falsities fit, as lies 68 DamonomadFeb 1934 piano bench, the beneath Chopin ManxSep 1985 solitary confinement felons cry "no mate in it"DCVer Jul 1931 

The monograph "The New Anagrammasia" was offered at $12.50for advance orders and $15 afterwards, with ten per cent of the receiptsgoing to the National Puzzlers' League. I felt that we had aguaranteed audience in the NPL for the sale of the monograph, and infact it did sell out in a relatively short time. The following year,1992, we issued two more monographs in a 100-copy edition, JeffGrant's "The Palindromicon" a collection of more than2000 palindromic words, phrases and proper names taken from manylanguages, and Stephen Chism's 173-page "From A toZotamorf', a dictionary of all known palindromic phrases. This wasoffered in softcover for $18, with a limited number of copies bound bythe University of Arkansas library (where he worked) and sold for $35.When the first set sold out Stephen printed a second set of 100 himself,but we still processed the orders and received at least some of theprofits. This long-distance collaboration didn't work very well,for he was dilatory in sending out books. Furthermore, the qualitycontrol of the library was not very good and many hardbound copies werereturned defective. Although it was Word Ways' most profitableventure-- Faith estimated we made $1200 from it--she wasn't sorryto quit when Stephen suggested he'd had enough.

Although Word Ways' main role, in my view, was to serve as aforum for exchange of ideas among logologists, and to advance the fieldof logology, it had another purpose as well. For many years my dream wasto write an encyclopedia of logology, summarizing what was known in thischaotic field and bringing some sort of logical order to it. Materialfrom Word Ways was to serve as a source of ideas and examples for thiswork. In the shorter run, I saw Word Ways as a source of material forlogology talks, word-related columns in other magazines, and anthologies("the best of Word Ways").

In the spring of 1975 Leonard Ashley, a professor of English at theBrooklyn College branch of the City College of New York who had beenregularly been contributing word quizzes to Word Ways, suggested that Imight be interested in attending the annual Names Institute, a one-dayregional meeting of the American Names Society held at FairleighDickinson University on the first Saturday of May. Remembering mydifficulties in understanding papers presented at meetings in the fieldof statistics, I feared that I would get nothing out of papers onlinguistics, a field in which I had no academic training. On the otherhand there was always the possibility that I might be able to spread theword (and sample copies) of Word Ways. So Faith and I went to themeeting on May 3 1975. I was surprised by two aspects of the meeting:attendance was so small, about 25 people in all, that nearly everyonethere was either a speaker or a session moderator, and the papers,although scholarly, weren't particularly hard to understand. Ifound it somewhat appalling that many speakers made no attempt to give alively talk, merely reading their paper verbatim from the lectern.Because the group was so small, people did make an attempt to befriendly with newcomers, and we even got a couple of Word Ways nibbles.I continued to attend Names Institute meetings, at first every otheryear. And I gave talks:

1977: A Logologist Looks at Onomastics, Or Whatever Happened toPresident Smith?

1979: From Hair to Eternity: An Onomastic Tour of American BeautyParlors and Barber Shops

1980: Superultramegalosesquipedalia (the 3640-letter name for bovineglutamate dehydrogenase)

1982: Single-Letter Surnames in the United States

1983: What' s Your Nom? Pseudonyms in the NationalPuzzlers' League

1984: Henry to Harold to Donald to Michael: Changing Fashions inMale Names, 1870-1960

1986: Clothes Encounters: An Onomastic Tour of Boutiques andHaberdasheries

My talks were generally welcomed as leavening for some of the deadlyserious ones presented on obscure onomastic topics (Faith especiallydetested talks on Lope de Vega, an author from Spanish literature). The1979 talk was videotaped and made available to other regional meetingsof the American Names Society, and also featured in a Newark Star-Ledgerarticle on May 13 1979. The Names Institute was single-handedly run byWallace McMullen, a professor in the English Department at FairleighDickinson. After he resigned from this task and the meeting wastransferred to New York City, I ceased attending.

I gave one other academic talk, "The Superiority of English asa Vehicle for Wordplay" at New York University on April 20 1985, aspart of the 20th anniversary celebration of the American Society ofGeolinguistics. I argued for English on several grounds: its extremelylarge stock of words, its polyglot nature, its statistical structure(not well understood, but manifested by such facts as the greaterdifficulty of constructing crossword puzzles in Italian), and its syntax(Petr Beckmann's view of language as an error-detecting anderror-correcting code). I facetiously suggested the title "English:Best For(e)play With Words", but no doubt this was deemed toofrivolous for an academic audience.

Faith and I were asked by Gloria Rosenthal to be one of the speakersat the December 7-9 1984 seminar "The Wonderful World ofWords" held annually on the premises of the Mohonk House in theShawangunk Mountains west of New Paltz, New York. Although theorientation of this seminar was more toward word-puzzle competition thanlogological research, much like the National Puzzlers' League,still I thought this might offer an opportunity to find additional WordWays subscribers. (The preceding year, we had sent up a box of surplusWord Ways inventory for distribution to the participants, but withoutmuch result as far as subscriptions were concerned.) Speakers were givenno honorarium other than free room and board, but this was no deterrent.The Mohonk House is, perhaps, the last of the old-time mountain-tophotels of the Catskills which flourished in the last century, an immenseVictorian pile set in a stunning landscape of lakes and rocky crags. Wehad sampled the pleasures of its views and its network of hiking trails(mostly old carriage roads) twice before, in August 1974 and August1979, upon the 50th and 55th wedding anniversaries of my parents. Wearrived there just at sunset on Friday evening, the day aider an icestorm. The flash and glitter of ice on the bare tree branches and acoating of snow on the ground made it look like fairyland.

We knew only one of the more than one hundred participants thatweekend, Miriam Raphael of the National Puzzlers' League. Among thespeakers, we were well acquainted with both Will Shortz and WillardEspy, and looked forward to meeting Paul Dickson, mentioned earlier asthe collector of synonyms for "intoxicated" and the author ofWords.

A. ROSS ECKLER

Basking Ridge, New Jersey