Speaker 1: A femeral is a protection of my heart radio. In
Speaker 1: the discipline that is ephemer studies, the number one subject
Speaker 1: is this paper. Institutions like the UK's Center for Ephemera
Speaker 1: Studies at Reading University or the ephemer Society of America
Speaker 1: maintain collections with no shortage of examples. Bus tickets, handbills,
Speaker 1: breeding cards, stamps, pamphlets, advertisements, and calendars passed to name
Speaker 1: a few, but not all. Ephemera is historical. Multitudes of papers,
Speaker 1: imbued with the hard work and creativity of their designers,
Speaker 1: are produced every day with an uncertain future. Today the
Speaker 1: stories of two individuals working in very different but equally
Speaker 1: ephemeral uses of the printed page. What is is that
Speaker 1: elevator pitch version of is like if if you meet
Speaker 1: someone in a bar and ask you what you do? What?
Speaker 1: What do you say? The quick pitches that we are
Speaker 1: the world's largest collection of sketch books that anyone can
Speaker 1: be a part of. My name is Steven Peterman. I'm
Speaker 1: the founder and director of the Sketchbook Project in Brooklyn
Speaker 1: Art Library. The Sketchbook Project was born out of frustration
Speaker 1: from a lack of creative outlets. There were a lot
Speaker 1: of galleries that were doing call for entries and you
Speaker 1: would pay and you were not guaranteed to be in
Speaker 1: a show. And on the other hand, there were these
Speaker 1: sort of like elite galleries that you had to apply
Speaker 1: for her and maybe you got in or a few
Speaker 1: people did. Stephen and his friends wanted to put together
Speaker 1: an exhibition. We're the only bar for entry was a
Speaker 1: person's interest. He describes their early efforts as one dimensional.
Speaker 1: We're just gonna send out a disposable camera to a
Speaker 1: hundred people, or we're going to send out a canvas
Speaker 1: two hundred people and see what happened. Everybody sees nature
Speaker 1: through different This is a couple of years before like kickstarters,
Speaker 1: so we were essentially crowdfunding the project but did not
Speaker 1: know what to call it. So we were like, hey,
Speaker 1: if we get all these people to do it, we
Speaker 1: can have this really cool exhibition six months to a
Speaker 1: year in we we decided to use sketch books, called
Speaker 1: it the Sketchery Project, and we filled up five people
Speaker 1: really fast and sort of limited it to that, and
Speaker 1: then we did that for a few years and we're like,
Speaker 1: what happens if we just keep going? Two and ten
Speaker 1: are big peak year where we had twenty thousand people
Speaker 1: signed up for the project. That allowed us to be
Speaker 1: able to do more and higher people. And that's when
Speaker 1: we moved up to New York and opened up. The
Speaker 1: initial iteration of our library of twelve hundred books within
Speaker 1: a year would become eleven thousand. Year over year, the
Speaker 1: number of submissions would grow exponentially. At the time of
Speaker 1: this recording, we have forty one thousand books from over
Speaker 1: a hundred different countries. With twelve years of practice, the
Speaker 1: Sketch Book Project has their submission process down to a science.
Speaker 1: We are still crowdfunded through participation. So you buy the
Speaker 1: blank book from us, which is also your like ticket
Speaker 1: into the library. If someone's interested, they can find us
Speaker 1: online or go up to one of our exhibitions and
Speaker 1: by the blank book, it comes with instructions on how
Speaker 1: to get it back to us and how to contact
Speaker 1: us and things like that, and then it also has
Speaker 1: like a list of the themes. You fill it up
Speaker 1: before you send it back. You then log into our website,
Speaker 1: you create an account and you actually catalog your book,
Speaker 1: so that means you put in your name, your bio
Speaker 1: and artist statement about your book. You put in your mediums.
Speaker 1: You use the materials, you use general key terms and
Speaker 1: tag words, really anything you want. All of that becomes
Speaker 1: searchable in our library system. When you're done, you'll sign
Speaker 1: an envelope and ship it to us. We then catalog
Speaker 1: them into the library system. Your book as a bar
Speaker 1: cut on the back that originally got and you use
Speaker 1: that to connect to our account. We'll scan it and
Speaker 1: if you followed instructions properly, it prints out at barcode
Speaker 1: with your name and your city on it and your
Speaker 1: theme and everything that you chose, and you get a
Speaker 1: little call number in the library. We replace your old
Speaker 1: barcode with the new barcode, so you have your name
Speaker 1: and everything on there, and then your books on the shelf. Initially,
Speaker 1: your book will travel with the bookmobile throughout the summer.
Speaker 1: We do different exhibitions, We do different pop ups all
Speaker 1: over the country, and sometimes we travel international as well.
Speaker 1: And then at the end of your tour, your book
Speaker 1: will then live permanently in the Brooklyn Art Library. That
Speaker 1: whole time, it's searchable by anyone. You can get email
Speaker 1: or text message notifications when someone looks at your book,
Speaker 1: so you can just be like sitting there one day
Speaker 1: and you get it's like Steven from Brooklyn is currently
Speaker 1: viewing your book at Brooklyn Art Library. Unlike the thousand
Speaker 1: likes you may get by sharing something on Instagram, if
Speaker 1: this person is having this intimate moment with your art
Speaker 1: org and like whole to get and flipping through it.
Speaker 1: Once the book is living in the library, someone may search.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe your book was about dogs, maybe your
Speaker 1: book was about death. They see your book and it
Speaker 1: looks interesting and they hit check out and we'll pull
Speaker 1: the book off the shelf for you. You always get
Speaker 1: a random book as well, which is the book to
Speaker 1: the right of it on the self. Most of the
Speaker 1: time people love the random book more than the book
Speaker 1: that they searched for. The system is extremely random, and
Speaker 1: we that's why we love it. People have a natural
Speaker 1: fear of like walking in and they're like, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know what to pick, and we're like, just just
Speaker 1: embrace it, just go with it. You don't know what
Speaker 1: you're gonna get, and if you embrace the randomness, you
Speaker 1: can truly like get lost in this entire collection. Kismet
Speaker 1: is the word that comes to mind my introduction to
Speaker 1: the Sketchbook Project and this conversation was equally serendipitous. The
Speaker 1: book mobile was parked outside my office. Okay, and their bookmobile,
Speaker 1: by the way, it's five piaggio. Ape is awesome. Well,
Speaker 1: it's so small you can drive it. It goes, you know,
Speaker 1: twelve to eighteen miles per hour depending on the wind speed.
Speaker 1: She put on like a flatbed or something. Actually it
Speaker 1: fits in the van. It is. It is like a
Speaker 1: little Russian doll. The touring collection contains or so newest submissions.
Speaker 1: The first thing you notice is how similar they all are.
Speaker 1: Everyone starts with the same thing. It's a five by
Speaker 1: seven book, like a blank one here. Yeah, just it's
Speaker 1: real basic. It's staple bound. They're sixteen, so thirty two
Speaker 1: back in front. And the second thing you notice is
Speaker 1: how incredibly different they all are. We really like encourage
Speaker 1: people to make it their own. And so she used
Speaker 1: the long noting and the book is about Yeah. Part
Speaker 1: of the challenge, I feel, is that you use the
Speaker 1: original book in some way, as you can see a
Speaker 1: lot of the signs having done and there's threading, or
Speaker 1: or you can literally just changing the type of finding.
Speaker 1: Some people literally just take the partet off, stick it
Speaker 1: on a new book. Yeah, so they just kept the
Speaker 1: cover trunk covering back from there and then filled it
Speaker 1: with this like long folding. But I think it's really
Speaker 1: interesting to people that want to change it and find
Speaker 1: a way to change it within that format. Let's think
Speaker 1: she used the original paper. She might a glued you guess,
Speaker 1: include some thicker paper on top that looks pretty thin
Speaker 1: when it starts, but you can expand it up to
Speaker 1: an inch. So this is the whole thing folds out,
Speaker 1: sold out. It's like a single piece. It can open
Speaker 1: up to whatever you want as long as it folds
Speaker 1: back down to that original size. That's all that we
Speaker 1: ask of you. And it is amazing what people can
Speaker 1: do with that. So he's like a dude that's working
Speaker 1: doing grammar example of time using this to like blow
Speaker 1: off steir. I mean, we could get you know, where
Speaker 1: the adult contact comes in here. Yeah, but the artist
Speaker 1: says eighteen plus. That's nice that they pay to that.
Speaker 1: The sketchbooks end up in the sketchbook a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people will draw like the library, or or draw like
Speaker 1: the cover of our sketch book or something. This is
Speaker 1: much more what I would normally think of as a
Speaker 1: sketch book, practicing, drawing like figures, writing in like quotes
Speaker 1: from folks, some some dried flowers. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: kind of sketch movement I think I could do. This
Speaker 1: collection is a kaleidoscope because it reaches a diverse group
Speaker 1: of contributors. Anyone can participate and be creative. We have children,
Speaker 1: we have very old people. We have everywhere in between.
Speaker 1: And we have moms and dads and art students and
Speaker 1: professional illustrators and first time artists. We have over a
Speaker 1: hundred different countries. We have every continent in the world.
Speaker 1: We have two books from an arcticle, but we're not
Speaker 1: quite sure they're legit or not. But high school students
Speaker 1: or little kids come in and we're like, name any
Speaker 1: country you can think of, and we'll have a book
Speaker 1: from it. We don't jury the content. We want people
Speaker 1: to share their perspective no matter what. And so other
Speaker 1: than I would say literally like three bad apples, every
Speaker 1: other book has been okay to be on the cell.
Speaker 1: We have books about people who had survived cancer. We
Speaker 1: have books of like memorials of of people. We have
Speaker 1: books about childhood abuse. This is forty one thousand stories
Speaker 1: like it's it's taken on its own living organism. Part
Speaker 1: of what gives this organism life and fuels the success
Speaker 1: of the project has to be the tactility of the
Speaker 1: medium itself. People love to hold the books, especially when
Speaker 1: we go to elementary schools who did not have the
Speaker 1: same chiletood that we had and did not interact with
Speaker 1: physical books as much. It's so interesting to see them
Speaker 1: like touch the textures, I mean, and adults do that too.
Speaker 1: We do have a digital archive, but that's never been
Speaker 1: the same for us. That's like great for people that
Speaker 1: want to share their work. It's also been twelve years,
Speaker 1: so some of the books are becoming old and showing
Speaker 1: where and unless the book is like truly falling apart,
Speaker 1: which then we'll contact the artists and have them fix that.
Speaker 1: We sort of just it happens. It's an organic process.
Speaker 1: We moved spaces after six years, and we realized a
Speaker 1: lot of the books in the front that had been
Speaker 1: there for six years had more like fading on the
Speaker 1: side than other books, and because they were in the
Speaker 1: other window. I'm sure there are people who might listen
Speaker 1: to this and be like, oh, that's BS, But I
Speaker 1: think it's about this archive literally evolving. Why would we
Speaker 1: put it in like plastic bags and keep it all perfect.
Speaker 1: It's it's all part of this living thing, I guess
Speaker 1: it is. It's just like a piece of somebody. And
Speaker 1: I don't think that you necessarily get that with a
Speaker 1: different medium. No, you wouldn't. And we do other you know,
Speaker 1: we still do canvas space projects. We just did one
Speaker 1: and it's fun and it's you know, we got a
Speaker 1: lot of awesome artwork back it. It's it's not the same.
Speaker 1: We just have found out of the years that people
Speaker 1: feel really comfortable sharing in in a book format. It's
Speaker 1: it's sort of universal all ages. It's something that they
Speaker 1: can approach. I've yet to find an art related material
Speaker 1: that I could convince someone who is not an artist
Speaker 1: to take part in it. People are constantly like, my
Speaker 1: book would be filled with stick figures, and we're like,
Speaker 1: who cares? So what draw a million stick figures? Like
Speaker 1: that actually would be a pretty awesome book. I get
Speaker 1: there's people who just don't want to ever make arts,
Speaker 1: but even still, like you probably have a story to tell.
Speaker 1: A constant accumulation of ideas on paper. Does all of
Speaker 1: this combined achieve something that no individual work could alone.
Speaker 1: Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Speaker 1: For Stephen Peterman, it depends on where you're standing. It
Speaker 1: really is depends on what direction you go into it.
Speaker 1: I mean, when you're sitting there and it's it's anonymous,
Speaker 1: and the human brain can't count how many books are
Speaker 1: sitting on the self around you. It all blends together.
Speaker 1: They're all the same color basically, so it's sort of
Speaker 1: just one mass if you do the math. I think
Speaker 1: there are two million plus spreads of art work in
Speaker 1: the collection. I don't even think a brain can hold
Speaker 1: that many. It's tough to comprehend it. And we got
Speaker 1: four thousand every year or so. So all the ones
Speaker 1: we have with us in our book mobile are brand new.
Speaker 1: I've never seen any of them, and that is my
Speaker 1: favorite part of it. But if you start talking to people,
Speaker 1: are you you meet these artists who are like, I
Speaker 1: just drove here from Canada and I want to see
Speaker 1: my book and I haven't seen it in five years.
Speaker 1: We went to an artist studio in Brooklyn just a
Speaker 1: few months ago, and she gave us a book. She
Speaker 1: had done a few other books, but then she gave
Speaker 1: us one of her books from like two thousand and
Speaker 1: thirteen that she never handed in because she started it
Speaker 1: the week before sandy hit and then her house slid. It.
Speaker 1: She then finished it and it was so dark she
Speaker 1: couldn't give it up for five years. We came to
Speaker 1: interview her and she's like, actually have a surprise for you.
Speaker 1: I have this book. This woman came in the other day.
Speaker 1: She's on her second sketch book. She was a police
Speaker 1: officer in the World Trade Centers. She survived cancer, probably
Speaker 1: from the World Trade Center. And then she also was
Speaker 1: on the Amtrak train that crash. All of these things
Speaker 1: and so her first book was about cancer and now
Speaker 1: she's making a book about her amtrack crass. She drove
Speaker 1: up from Florida, her friend drove over up here because
Speaker 1: she needed to make this pilgrimage to her book in
Speaker 1: the library and like see it. We went all the
Speaker 1: way to Australia once with the project and we met
Speaker 1: this woman. We were on the other side of the world,
Speaker 1: and she was like sixt and she came up Twist
Speaker 1: and she's like, I want to thank you guys. I
Speaker 1: had never made art my whole entire life. I did
Speaker 1: the Sketcher Project, and then I enrolled an undergrad art
Speaker 1: school in her sixties. I'm on the other side of
Speaker 1: the world. Then this person is telling me how I
Speaker 1: helped them go back to school as a senior citizen.
Speaker 1: Was so cool. Not only have we had people come
Speaker 1: in to see their book, but we're getting a lot
Speaker 1: of people that are like, can I get my book back?
Speaker 1: Like I'm embarrassed that you have it from ten years ago.
Speaker 1: They never knew how long we'd be around. I mean,
Speaker 1: we're just an arts organization. So just the fact that
Speaker 1: we're getting into this second decade of the project, it's
Speaker 1: become like a time capsule. I actually I was doing
Speaker 1: an interview or something and they asked me to pull
Speaker 1: my book and it was my oldest one and it
Speaker 1: was not embarrassing, but it's like this is so weird,
Speaker 1: like this is not how I think now, And it
Speaker 1: was very like email. We're starting to have this evolution
Speaker 1: where like we are growing as people and the books
Speaker 1: are living in this archive. I think that's the key
Speaker 1: to the Sketchbook Project. Things don't proceed in a single
Speaker 1: direction idea submission archive. Time capsule. Instead works readers and
Speaker 1: creators exists as well, documented points inside a nebula interacting
Speaker 1: with each other over and over and new and unpredictable ways.
Speaker 1: You can go to the High Museum, or you can
Speaker 1: go to the moment and you can look at the
Speaker 1: art and then you feel inspired, but like what do
Speaker 1: you do with that? Like you just it ends. The
Speaker 1: story ends at when you walk away from that painting.
Speaker 1: I mean less you're buying a Popes card from the
Speaker 1: from the gift shop. But in our case, our hope
Speaker 1: is that you look at this literally their emails written
Speaker 1: in the back. You connect with this person who wants
Speaker 1: to connect to do They want to be a part
Speaker 1: of a global community, so you could connect with them.
Speaker 1: But then also you maybe you're inspired, maybe you then
Speaker 1: create a book and then you inspire someone else and
Speaker 1: it creates this full circle experience. So the inspiration, viewing
Speaker 1: and creation never stops. There's just like an endless circle
Speaker 1: of it. And so I I love creating the atmosphere
Speaker 1: that you walk out and you're like, oh no, I'm
Speaker 1: I can do this, Like I'm gonna go do this
Speaker 1: and then I'm gonna work on it and then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna send it and inspire somebody else in the process.
Speaker 1: You know. Our hope is that the archive lives on forever.
Speaker 1: Like we have no plans. We would never like separate
Speaker 1: the collection. Our long term goal for it is to
Speaker 1: set up a foundation that maintains this collection. My wife
Speaker 1: and I talked about all the time that we have
Speaker 1: been chosen for this. We cannot do anything other than this.
Speaker 1: This is what I've spent from thirty three I have
Speaker 1: worked on this project, and no plans to not. There
Speaker 1: are not many people who share the profession of Matt
Speaker 1: Gaffney right now, let's see, there's me, there's him, it's her.
Speaker 1: Right now, There's probably six people who do it for
Speaker 1: a little a couple of hundred, maybe speros hundred who
Speaker 1: do it as a serious hobby. And then there's people
Speaker 1: who may be only write two or three puzzles a
Speaker 1: year about some of them are very good. I met Gaffney,
Speaker 1: and I've been read across his professionally. I guess this
Speaker 1: twenty years this year. If you do crosswords, chances are
Speaker 1: you've attempted one of Matt's. They are everywhere. The Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal, the New York Times, Games Magazine, to name
Speaker 1: a few and in my humble opinion, he writes some
Speaker 1: of the finest puzzles around. I've spent many of the
Speaker 1: lazy morning or stolen Moment in an illuminated corner scribbling
Speaker 1: guests across one of his publications. But just in case
Speaker 1: you've not fallen under the spell of this incredibly addictive
Speaker 1: and popular puzzle, here are the basics that crossword. In
Speaker 1: the American version of a crossword, which is what most
Speaker 1: of your listeners will be familiar with, there are clues
Speaker 1: to words that are woven through the grid each letter
Speaker 1: in an Amy crossword as part of both and across
Speaker 1: and a downwards, So you get two chances at each letter.
Speaker 1: So if you don't know the Opera crew letter on
Speaker 1: the crossword, you might know the sports clue on the
Speaker 1: down one, so you get two shots at each one.
Speaker 1: That's kind of like a courtesy of market fairness to
Speaker 1: the solver that you get two shots at each letter.
Speaker 1: Do you need any help? The official first thing that
Speaker 1: we now acknowledge is what became the American crossword period
Speaker 1: in December of late teen thirteen, play a guy named
Speaker 1: Arthur wynn w y n n E. There has been
Speaker 1: some proto crossword type things before then, but he was
Speaker 1: the one who formalized it into what now is considered
Speaker 1: the first American cross work. The shape was sort of
Speaker 1: a diamond shaped. The center wasn't used, but the other
Speaker 1: aspects of it were similar. Newspapers took quickly to the
Speaker 1: crossword as a way to get more eyes on the page.
Speaker 1: Lowspapers pagan as a matter of course by everyone. News
Speaker 1: to a crossroots sort of gravitated towards being fifteen by
Speaker 1: fifteen for a daily size, kind of a nice little
Speaker 1: size for something to do every day. It's like you
Speaker 1: to get, of course, seem every day instead of a
Speaker 1: seven course meal, which is a Sunday cross room. That's
Speaker 1: twenty one by twenty one square is much bigger, and
Speaker 1: that's big enough that people just want to solve it
Speaker 1: once a week. Generally they're si delicious. Now with the
Speaker 1: Internet eclipsing newspapers in many ways, including crosswords, you have
Speaker 1: an explosion in puzzles of other sizes. Smaller is better
Speaker 1: now is with everything else. Some people like to solve,
Speaker 1: you know, ten by ten crosswords because you can knock
Speaker 1: out five of them in half an hour instead of
Speaker 1: one puzzle and a half. Now you get that same
Speaker 1: rush five times instead of one time. For Matt, this
Speaker 1: interest started before he even knew it. A cross word
Speaker 1: was I was told by my parents that they never
Speaker 1: really taught me to read. I just started cutting letters
Speaker 1: out of magazines and books and rearranging them so natural
Speaker 1: propensity to anagram saints and look letters and words in
Speaker 1: a strange way. When I was eight or nine, I
Speaker 1: started to solve puzzles and magazine The mainstay of his
Speaker 1: youth was Dell Champion, a popular game magazine you can
Speaker 1: still find in the checkout counter. After a few years
Speaker 1: of solving Dell puzzles, Matt thought to himself also to
Speaker 1: write one of these, and then I sent one in.
Speaker 1: I was thirteen at the time, and they didn't accept
Speaker 1: that one, but the editor, a guy named Wayne Robert Williams,
Speaker 1: took the time to wake me a two page letterback
Speaker 1: critiquing exactly why they were taking this puzzle and asking
Speaker 1: me to send others if I had any other ideas.
Speaker 1: So I didn't. I had my first puzzle published ever
Speaker 1: in the December issue of Dell Champions, so that was cool,
Speaker 1: and then it was off to the races. I loved
Speaker 1: it now the trick was to turn his hobby into
Speaker 1: a full time job. I didn't really enjoy steaming much
Speaker 1: of those of the gage students. I had two intellectual
Speaker 1: passions as a teenager, and they were crossed the puzzles
Speaker 1: and chest. So I thought I would love to be
Speaker 1: able to be a professional chess player or a crossword
Speaker 1: writer for a living. I tried chess, but by hi
Speaker 1: or so it was clear I was not gonna be
Speaker 1: the next Bobby Fishers. So I thought, well, okay, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe I'll be the Bobby Fisher of crosswords, and cross
Speaker 1: has worked at a better point. I'm better across them
Speaker 1: at chess. It turns out one of the reasons there
Speaker 1: are so few full time crossword constructors is that, in
Speaker 1: addition to the skill set required, the business end of
Speaker 1: crosswords is well cutthroat. Generally, publications take submissions from hobbyists
Speaker 1: and pros alike. Large outfits like The New York Times
Speaker 1: maybe a hundred submissions per week. It's then the job
Speaker 1: of the editors to pick which puzzles will run when
Speaker 1: and what might need to be changed. So you've written
Speaker 1: a great puzzle, chopped it around endlessly, maybe you've written
Speaker 1: fifty puzzles and finally one is accepted for publication payday,
Speaker 1: except you may have to wait until your puzzle is
Speaker 1: actually published, which can be months. Three hundred bucks across
Speaker 1: where it is with the Times doles out for a
Speaker 1: daily size and a thousand for Sunday submission, but that's
Speaker 1: the highest end of the scale. Some pay as little
Speaker 1: as twenty five or fifty dollars. There was a pecking order,
Speaker 1: you know, like in anything else, there's a hierarchy. But
Speaker 1: I started to approach it as doing something other than
Speaker 1: just freelancing, which you can't really make a living at.
Speaker 1: Very difficult this week on the Internet cafe online gaming
Speaker 1: in the mid to late nineties. The Internet was still
Speaker 1: as infancy then and the software had just come out
Speaker 1: recently that will allow people to solve on screen, or
Speaker 1: it had matured to the point where it was good software.
Speaker 1: So I went in query several hundred websites. I went
Speaker 1: to Slay and said you need a political cross road
Speaker 1: every week. And I went to PGA tour dot com
Speaker 1: and said you need a golf cross road every week.
Speaker 1: And I went to Billboard magazine said you need a
Speaker 1: music cross for every week. The big newspapers and magazine
Speaker 1: had their gigs and they had their solvers, But I
Speaker 1: was sort of like the little fishing boat that could
Speaker 1: get into the little of cracks where the big boats
Speaker 1: cutting finds. You have to be innovative, you have to
Speaker 1: keep reinventing yourself, and you have to be answered premarnially
Speaker 1: like in anything else. But I've been doing it for
Speaker 1: twenty years now without other sources of income. A well
Speaker 1: constructed crossford is a thing of beauty. It's not haphazard
Speaker 1: but balanced right brain, left brain order and artistry. There's
Speaker 1: three main parts to cross were. The first one is
Speaker 1: the theme. This time our puzzle will have some cool
Speaker 1: words it which will help you identify a famous landmark.
Speaker 1: That's the set of usually longer entries in the grid
Speaker 1: that have some unifying motifs to them, hopefully something clever. Now.
Speaker 1: There are some feamless crosswords or freestyle crosserts that don't
Speaker 1: have the theme at all, but most crossers do have
Speaker 1: the theme. The team is sort of like the reason
Speaker 1: for existing up the cross word. It's a solo at
Speaker 1: the cross road. That's what makes it unique. I could
Speaker 1: of go around with my theme Antenna on low level alert.
Speaker 1: I'm always on the lookout for interesting nine ten fifteen
Speaker 1: letter towards or phrases. If if I hear one of
Speaker 1: the TV shows or somebody says something, I'll think, I
Speaker 1: wonder if I can make a team from that. It's
Speaker 1: a weird I don't know if you can call it
Speaker 1: a talent, but so were predilections. But crosser writers we
Speaker 1: all tend to do that. So then once you go
Speaker 1: up with the theme, you try to get the best
Speaker 1: possible set of entries for that theme. You don't want
Speaker 1: to miss any good ones. You don't want to have
Speaker 1: somebody coming later and say, oh, this is really good,
Speaker 1: but for this one, you should us this instead and
Speaker 1: say I just didn't think of that. So you really
Speaker 1: want to put the time interest. The late Moral Regal,
Speaker 1: who many consider the greatest American crossing writer of all time,
Speaker 1: called that cooking the theme, So you want to cook
Speaker 1: your theme. Second partist to make the grid. Crosswords have
Speaker 1: what's called a hundred navy degree rotational symmetry, which means
Speaker 1: that if you turn the grid upside down, the black
Speaker 1: square pattern will remain the same that just came about
Speaker 1: for aesthetic reasons. There's no actual solid reason why you
Speaker 1: have to have it that way, but that's the standard now.
Speaker 1: It's like you put the longest beams in a building
Speaker 1: in first and then filling everything around that. It's the
Speaker 1: same with the cross where you put the longest entries
Speaker 1: in first and then put the what we call the
Speaker 1: fill the shorter entries around it. You don't want to
Speaker 1: have a duplication the grid, so if you have you know,
Speaker 1: oven at one across, you don't want to have ovens
Speaker 1: in eighteen down or something. And you want to maximize
Speaker 1: your film too, you're gonna need some crosswords stand by
Speaker 1: words like aria and era E R A, which is
Speaker 1: the most common entry in all of crosswords by wide
Speaker 1: margin three letters period of time. Era ERA is correct
Speaker 1: just because it's three letters long, which is the shortness
Speaker 1: and entry can be in a standard cross rood, and
Speaker 1: it's got all good letters and two valves. So you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a bunch of those. But you also want
Speaker 1: to have some fun stuff too that has high value
Speaker 1: letters in scrip of a in it, like kazoo. You
Speaker 1: want to have stuff that's contemporary. Somebody had cardi B
Speaker 1: in across rood the other day, so you want to
Speaker 1: have stuff like that just to show the solver that
Speaker 1: cross Rood was not written thirty years ago. And then
Speaker 1: the third part. Once you're happy with the field, then
Speaker 1: you want to clue. It's six letter word a city
Speaker 1: where the squares have fun on the common and the clues, well,
Speaker 1: you want to maximize those two. You want to decide
Speaker 1: what difficulty level it's going to be. Eight letter worry
Speaker 1: one of the biggest defeats of all time. You could
Speaker 1: have a grid with very simple words that any sixth
Speaker 1: grader would know every single word in the script. But
Speaker 1: you can make it a beyond expert level of solved
Speaker 1: just by making the clue to fall out a word
Speaker 1: the color of Jack Benny's eyes, a clue that's a pun,
Speaker 1: or that's a clever plan, words that's generally appreciate. It
Speaker 1: set a lot of word. If you have a lot
Speaker 1: of this on the ball, you can be a good
Speaker 1: pool player. Then you edit it and send it to
Speaker 1: you whoever has agreed to pay for it, and then
Speaker 1: it's done. By the early odds, the genre felt like
Speaker 1: it was at a standstill what I call a theme
Speaker 1: crisis in American crosswords. Let's say there's a mountain that
Speaker 1: had a bunch of golden and everybody went there for
Speaker 1: decades picking at the mountain. After six year, seventy years
Speaker 1: and started to get kind of picked over, and you
Speaker 1: still have the occasional little knife find in there, but
Speaker 1: it was tougher and tougher, and it wasn't like it
Speaker 1: used to be. There was a quote from Oscar Wilde.
Speaker 1: I think I'm getting it verbatim. It said, to love
Speaker 1: oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Okay, so
Speaker 1: that's kind of an amazing quote, and that's why a
Speaker 1: famous person. But the reason it's appeared in so many
Speaker 1: crosses because it's forty five letters long, and they cleave
Speaker 1: fifteen fifteen fifteen. To love Oneself is is fifteen the
Speaker 1: beginning of as fifteen lifelong romances fifteen, and it also
Speaker 1: pleased perfectly syntactically. To love oneself is second line across
Speaker 1: the middle of the grid, the beginning of a and
Speaker 1: then you have to see what's doing one is because
Speaker 1: you're just no beginning of a lifelong romance. That quote
Speaker 1: is perfect. It's like it was written to appear in
Speaker 1: a cross roots. So it's been used in probably a
Speaker 1: dozen cross roots. I know it'sn't appeared in the near
Speaker 1: times at least three times over the decades. And there's
Speaker 1: others too, like the understanding Way was really kind. His
Speaker 1: name is fifteen letters. The sun also rises as fifteen
Speaker 1: letters and a farewell to arms team letters perfect. It's
Speaker 1: appeared in so many cross rout themes. Another one is
Speaker 1: the United States Independence Day and the fourth of July,
Speaker 1: all fifteen letters, and it's such as those those are
Speaker 1: basic ones, but even more complex teams have become used
Speaker 1: and seen before. And it was a bit frustrating, actually,
Speaker 1: because you would come up with a theme and then
Speaker 1: check online to see if somebody had done and somebody
Speaker 1: had often done it. It was kind of annoying. Now,
Speaker 1: I should say, you can still find nice tames, and
Speaker 1: people have expanded steaming in other ways. But I was
Speaker 1: sort of the guy who said, Okay, this mountain of
Speaker 1: gold used to be great, but it's picked over. What
Speaker 1: about that mountain over there that was going to be tried?
Speaker 1: That mountain, so contest crosswords from me? Where that mountain was?
Speaker 1: That mountain over there? Contest crosswords for matt up the
Speaker 1: ante On the whole affair, I mostly known for those.
Speaker 1: Now that's what I'm become known for it. I wanted
Speaker 1: to find something that would really give crosswords a boost,
Speaker 1: taking in a different direction. And what I came up
Speaker 1: with was actually not an idea that I created, but
Speaker 1: I just remembered it from my use when I used
Speaker 1: to solve Dell Champion crossrood puzzles. This certain type of
Speaker 1: puzzle where it wasn't just a crossword where you are
Speaker 1: given the grid and the clues and when you feel
Speaker 1: in the last letter you's done. In a contest crossword,
Speaker 1: an additional puzzle lurks somewhere on the page, often when
Speaker 1: you can't even attempt to solve until you've successfully completed
Speaker 1: the grid. Along with the grid, you also got a
Speaker 1: set of instructions telling you you were looking for a
Speaker 1: specific thing, like the answer to this contest is a
Speaker 1: world capital or a Hitchcock movie, something specific like that,
Speaker 1: a letter words starting with B or whatever. You solve
Speaker 1: the puzzle, and then after you're done, you have to
Speaker 1: find that hitch Kind grove, your world chapel or whatever,
Speaker 1: and it's hidden somewhere using some unique mechanism. It's hidden
Speaker 1: in the grid or the clues or both, so it's
Speaker 1: like a little treasure hunt. And some of them are
Speaker 1: very simple, but they can also get hellishly complex where
Speaker 1: it can take even the best solvers days to finally
Speaker 1: get the answer. The really rejuvenated crossroots in a way,
Speaker 1: I would say now other constructors have started writing these
Speaker 1: contest crossroots as well. Big places like the Well Street
Speaker 1: Journal publishes one every Friday. I write it every other Friday,
Speaker 1: and they're very fun to write as well as to sell.
Speaker 1: Twenty one across a five letter word, you can lose
Speaker 1: a lot of money on one of these. Why has
Speaker 1: this hundred year old word game proven a resilient form
Speaker 1: of entertainment because crossroads evolved alongside the languages and cultus
Speaker 1: of which they are a part. Crosswords that right now
Speaker 1: would be considered to niche or too millennial oriented, or
Speaker 1: too strange or something full of like slength that nobody
Speaker 1: over thirty five have ever heard of, wouldn't be as
Speaker 1: likely to be published if they had to go through
Speaker 1: you know, some old editor like me, some old gatekeeper
Speaker 1: or people older than me who just says, I don't
Speaker 1: know any of this stuff. It's not going in there.
Speaker 1: Because now they can publish online there's other crosswords specific
Speaker 1: publications that cater to them, and they've built their own
Speaker 1: fan bases. So it's proven to be a flexible for
Speaker 1: an entertainment. And I would say it it's we're extainly
Speaker 1: not decreasing in populard. I would say, it's actually growing up.
Speaker 1: Do you just sit down and do crosswords too? That
Speaker 1: aren't your crosswords? You know? I solve very selectively. Usually
Speaker 1: it's to test solve the puzzle for a friend, and
Speaker 1: the other one of three times will be if some
Speaker 1: real a list name comes up and I don't want
Speaker 1: to miss this one, or if a certain cross root
Speaker 1: has gotten a lot of buzz online as it's come out,
Speaker 1: I'll say, okay, let me print this out and see
Speaker 1: what's going on. I read a website called Diary of
Speaker 1: the cross Roof feed every day that reviews five or
Speaker 1: six puzzles a day in New York Times, Universal News, Day,
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal, all the big ones, a lot of
Speaker 1: the independent cross roots. So I'm in touch with almost
Speaker 1: every major cross roots that's published, and I've at least
Speaker 1: laid eyes on it if I haven't solved it. Despite
Speaker 1: this tight knit community for Matt Gaffney the experience on
Speaker 1: the other end of the crossword can be elusive for
Speaker 1: puzzle constructors, Like many types of writers, there's a fundamental
Speaker 1: disconnect between you and your audience. I don't often get
Speaker 1: to see cross roots in the wild, you know. Sometimes
Speaker 1: I'll stumble upon somebody in a bar or on a
Speaker 1: train or something, and they'll be solving one of my crosswords.
Speaker 1: But crosswords, writing them as solitary is solving them as
Speaker 1: generally solitary. At parties or in social events is where
Speaker 1: I get to hear people of actual solving experiences, and
Speaker 1: also what they like and what they look for and
Speaker 1: across words. I tend to view the crossword as art.
Speaker 1: They tend to view it as entertainment. They're solving it
Speaker 1: for minutes of pleasure, enjoyment, fun, past the time, whatever.
Speaker 1: I understand that it's an experience for people like that,
Speaker 1: but I'm also looking at it to be as artistically
Speaker 1: interesting as possible, and some of that translates over. You
Speaker 1: can enjoy beer, but you're not gonna know what the
Speaker 1: brewer does, and there are certain things you don't even
Speaker 1: care about that the brewer puts lots of time and
Speaker 1: effort into making sure are to him good, but to
Speaker 1: you you might not even know. So take a single
Speaker 1: crossword puzzle, all those puns, tricky hints, word play, and
Speaker 1: the hard fought battles in every square, and multiply that
Speaker 1: by one a day for twenty years. How much of
Speaker 1: that can be saved. We have these busy lives and
Speaker 1: the going down, and we wonder what's gonna last and
Speaker 1: what can our brains even hold. So you do have
Speaker 1: this nostalgic since that life is fleeting. None of us
Speaker 1: can printed. You know, you have that sort of look
Speaker 1: when you get a slowing river across or pushing by,
Speaker 1: And then sometimes you have reason to go back and
Speaker 1: look at one from eight or ten years ago, and
Speaker 1: you say, even if it's one I write, I, sometimes
Speaker 1: I won't even remember it. I'll say I said that
Speaker 1: I wrote this. It makes sense, it sounds like something
Speaker 1: I would have done. I don't even remember. To a
Speaker 1: crossword solver, the crossword may very well be a famor
Speaker 1: just a way to pleasantly passed minutes, and then they
Speaker 1: never have to think about it again. Either way of
Speaker 1: looking at it as aren't or as entertainment is fine
Speaker 1: with me. Let me ask you this is it? Is
Speaker 1: it still a fun gig twenty years plus later, an
Speaker 1: incredible job, and I'm going to be doing this as
Speaker 1: long as I am able. Ephemeral is written, assembled by Quilliams,
Speaker 1: and produced by Annie Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil.
Speaker 1: Production assistance this episode from Trevor Young and additional mixing
Speaker 1: from Josh Thain, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Matt
Speaker 1: gaffney is the author of Gridlock, crossword puzzles and the
Speaker 1: mad geniuses who create them. You can find links to puzzles,
Speaker 1: books and a fabulous online crossword contest at mcgaffney dot com.
Speaker 1: And to submit your own sketch book and join the
Speaker 1: global community, visit Sketchbook Project dot com. If you're lucky
Speaker 1: enough to be in New York, go and visit the
Speaker 1: Brooklyn Art Library in Williamsburg. Somewhere in that nebula of
Speaker 1: books is a new submission from yours truly. Just search
Speaker 1: for the keyword ephemeral and for more from this archive,
Speaker 1: search no further than ephemeral dot show Next time on Ephemeral.
Speaker 1: It was a very high paced, very stressful job. Words
Speaker 1: are coming in your ear you're talking to somebody else.
Speaker 1: You're checking the wires to make sure that other people
Speaker 1: have completed their calls. You're also making notes about how
Speaker 1: long the call lasted, because you're going to charge the
Speaker 1: customer based on how long the call lasted, note where
Speaker 1: the call went to. And you're doing this with a
Speaker 1: board of fifty calls that are coming in all at
Speaker 1: the same time. The army did have to use men sometimes,
Speaker 1: and they found that it took the average infantrymen sixty
Speaker 1: seconds to complete a call. It took the average woman
Speaker 1: ten seconds. So in war time, the difference between sixty
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Speaker 1: getting your head blown off and the word wild and
Speaker 1: inacquen Shoe final podcast from I Heart Radio, Isn't the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio of Apple Podcasts of Whenever using your
Speaker 1: favorite shows