Martin Ashwood-Smith author page

I've always liked crosswords with wide open centers. To my eyes, they often look like printers' errors, because of the dearth of black squares in the middle... and I admire a good "dearth", on occasions.

However, one problem with open-center grids is that they can be very segmented, meaning that the central open area could almost be a separate mini-puzzle (I'm hardly innocent in this regard, incidentally). I hope today's puzzle is a bit more solver-friendly than some of my previous efforts, because of the long intersecting across and down entries that run through the center of the grid.

Also, I tried to make those six long entries as interesting as possible. But I only succeeded with five: CAPITALISTIC won't exactly set the crossword world afire. Maybe GEORGE SMILEY and MARILYN MONROE will provide a bit more zing!

There's one word in the grid that may be an eyebrow-raiser: 18-Across: NATANT. If you're unfamiliar with NATANT, it means "swimming" or "floating" (you'll find it in a regular college dictionary). I had considered removing it, but I thought it an interesting word for a Saturday puzzle. However, if you don't like NATANT, I hope the accompanying photograph by Jazmin Miranda will make up for it.

GEORGE: This is our third collaborative quad stack crossword published in the New York Times [two others have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and others may be found here]. Our goal has been to transcend the notion that these are "stunt" puzzles, and satisfy the same criteria of liveliness and smoothness that characterize the increasingly exacting standards of late-week themeless puzzles.

Today's puzzle, created over a 3-month period in late 2014/early 2015, features six 15-letter horizontal entries, four of which are Shortz-era debuts. Our seed (and your ear-worm) was the Eagles classic HOTEL CALIFORNIA (co-written by the late great Glenn Frey, and clued in an evocative way). Interestingly, LAID_IT_ON_THE_LINE was introduced by Sophie Fierman during the Maleska era (1977), remained unused for nearly four decades, but now shows up for the fourth time this calendar year (Saturdays by Flinn and Guizzo, and a Friday by one of us). What are the odds of that?

The key find for this puzzle was the 11-letter "Rent" showstopper, LA VIE BOHEME, moderately inferable due to the relationship between the star-crossed Larson musical and the legendary Puccini opera, cutting through the central quad. Overall, we are quite pleased with how the puzzle turned out and hope it gives you a few "aha" moments and evokes some interesting memories.

This is an unusual grid. As you can see, it has a set of quad-stacked 15s running through the center of the grid, and a pair of triple-stacked 15s at the top and the bottom. When I first started constructing this crossword, I did not have this goal in mind. This is because all of my quadstack puzzles have been constructed "backwards." By "backwards" I mean that I start by trying to create a set of four 15-letter words to stack independently of the grid.

But, how are the actual quad-sack sets constructed? The answer is: by any means possible!

Some solvers think it's 100% computer and word list management. However, in reality, using a computer to "brute force" a quad-stack is often doomed to failure. It is possible, but the results are usually very poor, because the computer word list has to be very, very large. And that means: lots of unusual, really poor, rare words. Furthermore it's a good way to fry your hard-drive! (I speak from experience!)

The best approach I've found, is a combination of old-fashioned hand constructing, with varying degrees of computer assistance.

When I think I have what may be a viable stack, usually with at least a couple of nonsensical 4-letter combinations crossing the stacks, I set to work trying to design a possible grid (if I'm lucky) around the stacks. Frequently I do this on my iPhone. Indeed, some of today's puzzle was actually completed in the parking lot of a local late-night donut shop ... and heck, I got free police protection too ;)

Seriously though, as I said, these puzzle are a combination of computer assistance, hand construction and sheer luck. And in the case of this puzzle, it was sheer luck that gave me the possibility of adding the extra stacks.

However, if I had not found two strong 10-letter words (CHILD BIRTH and TORE TO BITS) to join the stacks, Will Shortz would not have accepted this puzzle. Those two long words meant that Will was willing to break his moratorium on this style of grid, mainly because there was greater interconnectivity between the stacked parts of the grid.

Personally, I still think the puzzle (obviously) would be improved by a less segmented grid. But, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first time a 3/4/3 stack pattern has ever been published. So if some solvers think that this is too much of a "stunt" grid: I plead guilty. But I do hope this is still interesting and entertaining to solvers.

We are delighted with the publication of our second collaborative quad stack crossword for the New York Times [two others have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, and others may be found at this site, including the just posted "Eight Across." Reviewing our files, we find no less than fifteen separate versions, all generated, modified, and optimized over an intense week-long period in July 2014 that in turn followed a painstaking multi-month process to identify several potential seed quads.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first published quad stack that contains three grid-spanning vertical entries of length 16 that are symmetrically situated and cross the central quad. To discover GREAT_BARRIER_REEF, MAKING_AN_ENTRANCE, and TEN_THOUSAND_YEARS required much tenacity, intuition, and no small modicum of good luck. Note that the adjective TEN in the third of these 16-letter entries could just as well have been ONE, TWO or SIX, and we did indeed debate their relative merits and completed appropriate alternative grids. We settled on TEN because it was tied to a specific definition [Banzai], whereas the others seemed somewhat more arbitrary ("green-paintish," in constructor parlance).

As for the four 15-letter horizontal entries comprising the quad, AMASSED_A_FORTUNE and HURRICANE_SEASON are also New York Times debuts, whereas AFRICAN_ELEPHANT previously appeared in themeless puzzles by Byron White and Patrick Berry and the only Shortz-era mention of STICKS_AND_STONES was in a Monday (themed) crossword by Peter Gordon.

Intermediate drafts of this puzzle had SANAA (Yemen's capital) in column 7 and OF_ELD (a not entirely desirable partial) in column 9; this intersected the present tense AMASSES_A_FORTUNE. Not satisfied, we changed to past tense (S to D), and then stumbled across DANAIDES, which had been used twice by Farrar and once by Maleska, but not during the Shortz era. Nevertheless, as the link amply demonstrates, we convinced ourselves that this entry derived from Greek mythology would still be an apt late-week puzzle word, and were thrilled to note that SEINFELD could now be placed symmetrically.

The seeds for this puzzle were planted some nine months ago, based on the following rationale. It's well known that 15-letter answer words (or phrases) are very common in daily-sized 15x15 crosswords. In themed puzzles, they are easier for constructors to work with than slightly shorter words of length 13 or 14. Alternatively, stacked arrangements of grid-spanning 15's can have an impressive appearance in unthemed crosswords. Unfortunately, quite a few of the 15s found in such puzzles suffer from from overuse.

It occurred to me that a richer and more varied assortment of entries could become available by drawing on somewhat shorter words of length 12 and 13, and set out to find five longish answer words that could be stacked "stair-style" through the center of a themeless grid. It took a steady 4 or 5 months of experimentation to come up with a grid that I liked enough to show Will. His response to the overall idea was enthusiastic, but he pointed out several specific long words that he felt were too rare to be usable.

Thus, an additional 4 months were required to develop the final grid that you see today. I would like to thank Martin Herbach and George Barany for helpful feedback and encouragement throughout the process. Surprisingly, Will scheduled the publication for a mere month after its acceptance. Happy solving!

The quad stack crossword that you see here is unique in my history of constructions in this genre, because of the relative speed with which it came together. The saga started with receipt of a rejection from Will of a different puzzle, due to one particular spanning 15 that he did not particularly like. Once I realized that the earlier submission was not salvageable, I set forth to create a different one with the same general architecture.

After fixing a cup of coffee and staring at a blank wall for half an hour, I suddenly remembered that the great Merl Reagle had published a triple stack 15x15 in Dell Champion Crosswords, with the creative but easier to handle DAYTON TENNESSEE (famous for the Scopes "Monkey Trial"). I e-mailed Merl that I was going to "steal" his entry if he was OK with it, and he shot back "Knock yourself out!"

Long story short. About 7 hours later, I had a half-decent grid, and after a further 8 hours, it was sufficiently polished that I felt it could be sent to Will first thing in the morning. Let me emphasize that quads typically take me several weeks to build, involving much trial and error, and there are many that go nowhere for months. Anyhow, when Will got back to me, he basically liked it but challenged me to remove one of the long down words (LISSOMENESS) and several of the short words. Several more hours of work (plus two cheater squares) later, I had the final version which I hope you'll agree raised the overall quality another notch or two.

Ending on a bittersweet note, I reminded Merl of his "stolen" entry in the last phone conversation we had, about a week before his tragic death. With his trademark chuckle, he said that he was looking forward to it, and then we moved to a more technical discussion of how to create stacks. I am so sorry that Merl never had a chance to see the final product.

Today's puzzle coincides with my father's 83rd birthday, so I dedicate it to Prof. M.J. Ashwood-Smith, aka Dad!

About a year and a half ago, my files included a puzzle that quad stacked 15s on both the top and the bottom. However, there were too many problem "crossers" running down though one or another of the quad sets. Most of these problems were in the top row, but because of normal crossword symmetry, any possible fixes to the top quad created additional problems for the bottom quad. I was about to abandon the project, until one afternoon in a coffee shop, I noticed that the lower quad might work quite well alone, as the basis for a puzzle with Left-Right mirror symmetry. Moreover, I noticed that two extra 10-letter words (27-and 28-D) could be thrown into the mix.

A few minutes later, I sketched a suitable grid on the back of a napkin, leaving a reasonable amount of flexibility for the rest of the grid. I was happy to get in JOHN STEINBECK and ORWELLIAN, and the rest of the puzzle came together nicely around them. My only qualm was that I had to allow everyone's favorite bump in a log, KNAR, into the puzzle. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time the New York Times has used such a grid arrangement with a quad stack on the bottom.

With Will Shortz's blessing, I've also created exclusively for XWord Info a version of the puzzle that has the identical answer grid, but most words clued at the Monday/Tuesday level (clues written by MAS and George Barany). This is to make the point that wide open quad stack grids can be built using, for the most part, easier words that are accessible to early week level solvers (for the handful of slightly hard words in the grid, I have made sure that the crossing words are all easy).

But wait, there's more. With George Barany, I created a sister puzzle, which also has Left-Right mirror symmetry, but this time the quad is on the top (it had similar origins, where we had to toss a bottom quad). You can find two versions; unfortunately, both of them had an unfamiliar partial at 14-Down, and that was enough to be a dealbreaker. Still, George and I think that you'll enjoy these.

Happy solving!

Quadstack crosswords (i.e., crosswords with at least one set of quadruple stacked 15s) are still a fairly recent innovation. When such puzzles have been featured in the NYT over past four years or so, they've created some controversy. While many solvers seem to love the challenge and report a great sense of satisfaction when they finally crack the puzzle, other solvers have decidedly more "lukewarm feelings" towards the genre. The latter comes from the perception that the fill, especially in the stack area, is often hard, obscure, and substandard... or maybe all three!

With this in mind, I tried a few years ago to construct a quadstack puzzle, that could theoretically be clued with "easy" Monday-level clues. This was intended merely as a personal exercise, so the one I actually submitted had the usual tough or tricky Friday/Saturday clues.

Now that you've tackled a dreaded NYT Saturday quadstack puzzle, I share with you a version with the identical fill, but unofficially reclued in a manner that I hope less experienced solvers may be able to finish. If you have friends who normally get stumped on the NYT Friday/Saturday puzzles, please ask them have a shot at my "low octane" Monday/Tuesday rendition. I don't think there's very much in the way of obscurity to trip them up!

Also, keen-eyed solvers may notice that this puzzle contains the word BEAT in two of the longer entries: BEATING A RETREAT and HAND-BEATEN. At the time, I offered Will Shortz an alternative: replacing HAND-BEATEN with MOUSE-EATEN. However, Will said that he preferred HAND-BEATEN, and was not overly bothered by the BEAT dupe. So ... if you love the puzzle as it stands now, I'm happy to take full credit. However, if you're bothered even a wee bit by the dupe: it's all Will's fault!

Happy solving!

"Can we talk?"

We would love to tell you that JOAN RIVERS was the seed entry for this crossword. However, if you look at our initial (and never submitted) version of this puzzle, the long down entry in the tenth column was originally THE_SHIVERS ("What a haunted house may give you"). Here is how this puzzle evolved:

In June 2014, the two of us started collaborating on some original strategies to create novel quad stacks with fewer obscurities and fresher entries than are common for this genre — a story that will have to be told in another place at another time. The present grid, the sixth that we decided had enough promise to pursue seriously, started to emerge toward the end of July. An immediate concern was that the customary request from a trucker to interrupt an ongoing CB radio conversation is most commonly reported as BREAKER, BREAKER ONE NINER. After some discussion, we decided to try what we thought was a neat rule-breaking trick, putting the first word (BREAKER) at 1-Across, and having the 15-letter BREAKER ONE NINER cross-referenced.

However, once we started cluing this grid, we realized that "Words from a good buddy" worked equally well whether or not the answer grid had one or two BREAKERS. Therefore, we decided to redo the northwest corner and remove a black square that had previously been needed to accommodate BREAKER, and as long as we were at this, continue to try to improve other portions of the puzzle. Thus, we also removed a second symmetrically placed black square in the southeast corner and tried to remedy the inadvertent inclusion of two phrases both starting with STAGE.

In the midst of the aforementioned rework, we noticed that JOAN RIVERS could fit in nicely — this was weeks before she checked into a Manhattan clinic for a minor medical procedure, and wound up having her final life battle headlining the tabloid and mainstream media in print and on on the air. Thus, our inclusion of the late comedienne in our puzzle is a complete coincidence. Nevertheless, the day after she died, which was a little over two weeks after we submitted the puzzle, we heard back from Will Shortz, who mentioned that due to 15-Down he might run the puzzle soon. The terrific and unusual eight-line clue for 15-Down, along with many other fine, fair clues, were written by Will. In all, well over half of the clues in the puzzle are Will's, invariably for the better. We do hope that solvers, regardless of any earlier notions about quad stacks, enjoy working through this puzzle.

I'll come right out and say it: sorry about the two 15-letter "ONE'S" phrases in the top area of the puzzle. There are two reasons for this:

(1) Sheer laziness on my part. 15-letter "ONE'S" phrases tend to be easier to use, especially in stacked-style grids, and ...

(2) This puzzle was constructed more than two years ago, and the whole anti-ONES movement had yet to gain full momentum. So back then, I tended to use them a lot more than I would now.

Moving right along, a little about some of the other words in the puzzle:

LETTS: He's currently starring on Broadway in "The Realistic Joneses". Last year, he won a Tony for best actor in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" and way back in 2008, his play "August: Osage Country" won both a Tony and a Pulitzer. Sure beats [Some Balts].

OREO: Back in Maleska's day, this would have been clued : "Mountain: comb. form". Brand names were largely verboten.

ETTORE: Is Italian for Hector, apparently.

HERSHEY BAR: I understand these are quite popular in America.

OLIOS: Ah yes, some old-fashioned crosswordese. You're welcome.

THES: It's what us Brits drink in France instead of cafés. Technically we call this a FPOC (French Plural of Convenience).

STAFFA: Wordsworth, and a whole pile of his poet buddies, wrote oodles about this island, and Mendelssohn based part of his "Hebrides Overture" on it.

LORA: If you thought there'd be loads of famous women who would spell their name this way, you'd be wrong.

A noted crossword blogger wrote recently that quadstack (15s) crosswords had officially become my "shtick". And you know what? He's right... especially regarding my NYT contributions over the last couple of years.

Anyhow, today's puzzle almost never left the drawing board. Here's why. I'll start with a mini recap:

Solvers who've read my recent write ups, will probably be aware that quadstacks crosswords (at least for me, and as far as I'm aware, Joe Krozel too) are not constructed in the same way most other themeless crosswords are. So far, with every quadstack puzzle I've constructed, the stacks have always been assembled (for want of a better word) first. Then, any stacks that look like they may have potential, get moved on to the second stage: designing a custom grid that can fit symmetrically around the stacks.

However, this set of quadstacks featured a potential puzzle-killer: one of the 15-letter words "A TEENAGER IN LOVE", had been singled out by both blogger Amy Reynaldo and master constructor Patrick Berry (in his wonderful book "Crosswords for Dummies") as an example of a 15 that had been overused in stacked-fifteen style puzzles. Although I'd never used it in any of my NYT puzzles before, I shelved the offending stacks for a while, and got on with other projects.

Several months later, I decided to take a second look, because my "spidey" sense told me that this particular stack looked like it could work with practically no obscure crossers. It turned out that my "spidey" sense was right and the resulting grid was particularly clean. I mean how can you not like a quads with KITTEN CHOW running through them? Therefore I decided that the cleanness of the fill overrode yuckiness of the one overused 15.

Also couple of pluses this puzzle has that helped tip the scales from "shelve" to "send":

1. Only three 4-letter words cross the stacks (as opposed to the usual gazillion), and ...
2. it has none of those dreaded "ONES" 15s. You know, such as "SORT ONES ONES OUT" ("Do a cashier's job, maybe") ... OK I made that one up ;)

Also, for those readers who are still awake, you might be interested in an alternate grid I sent Will with two fewer cheater (black) squares. Which grid do you prefer?

Martin:

I like to think of today's double-quad-stack puzzle having a long-lost triple stack little brother from 1996. Do you see any similarity between the grids? In reality, any similarity is just a coincidence, but an intriguing one, nonetheless.

When I started constructing the top stacks for this puzzle, I though it would be fun to use a 15-letter word/phrase that is commonly seen at the very bottom of stacked puzzles: SATELLITE STATES, and placing it at 1-Across, at the very top. In this position, its abundance of low-point (useful word-ending) Scrabble letters, normally an advantage, would be all but useless.

After I finished what looked like a promising top stack, I then contacted my friend Joe Krozel to see if he had an "orphan" stack or two, that we could meld into a finished puzzle. By luck he did. Our first draft had 10-D SLUG, and FAIN in its mirror position. Luckily we were able to open the grid up more (and reduce the word count to 66) by extending both entries to SLUG IT OUT and SAMMY FAIN. We got lucky that day!

Joe:

When constructing my first dual quad-stack puzzle around 2010, I assembled a library of half-filled grids containing a single quad stack at the top or the bottom. So, I had numerous potential matches when Martin presented his upper quad stack to me; I just had to search my library for the closest matches, then Martin and I would move squares around to unite the two puzzle halves with the proper symmetry.

I started the lower quad stack with the lively seed entry AMIGLADTOSEEYOU. The vowels at the front and back ensured that 55-D and 60-D would be words rather than some all-consonant letter strings like SSSS or SSTS.

This puzzle started with the bottom stack, a lonely orphaned 4x15 sitting in my file of unfinished projects. The problem was that any potential top stack was going to be quite restricted, by the symmetry created by the bottom stack. After a couple of months, I decided to try the ultimate stack-maker's "cheat": loading up the bottom row with esses. So after grappling with my conscience for a full three or four nano-seconds, I hit upon STEMLESS GLASSES. If most of the Downs (through the top stacks) had not been rock-solid (with the sole exception of CTNS) I would have abandoned the STEMLESS GLASSES route and gone back to the drawing board.

This, as is so often the case, created a whole new set of problems: I couldn't for the life of me get the centre of the puzzle to work, unless I enlarged the grid and made it a 15x16. To make matters worse, PALESTRINA had to extend into a relatively obscure Haydn opera LA CANTERINA.

And finally, what I needed was a good LOGS??? entry to match a potential ???GUTS at the bottom. Unfortunately I had a mental block, thinking of only computer-related LOGS OUT, LOGS OFF, etc. Finally it dawned on me that those LOG SHIPS that sail up and down the (Juan de Fuca) strait less than a 1/2 mile from my house might come in useful (I live in British Columbia; major export = logs)!

Keen-eyed observers will notice that I've developed an obsession with circus elephants. Last month, I gave you TRAINED ELEPHANT, and today it's ELEPHANT TRAINER. I'd love to say this is a super-duper circus theme that'll run though my themeless puzzles, but alas, I cannot. These puzzles were constructed over two years apart, with dozens of other puzzles written and published in between, so the mini-dupe caught me by surprise when I noticed it a few days ago (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it!).

Finally a shout out to Kevin Der for paving the way back in 2010, by getting the whole double-quad-stack thing going. Coincidentally CTNS was also a stack-crossing entry in Kevin's pioneering puzzle. So you can think of CTNS as my tribute to Kevin Der, or maybe just a poor 4-letter fill word I'm desperately trying to justify using!

Anyway, I hope you'll find the rest of this puzzle, minus the circus elephants, trainers, and CTNS an enjoyable and challenging solve!

Joe Krozel mentioned recently that the whole trick of constructing quad-stack grids was to create as many independent mini 15x4 stacks as possible. And from them, try to build larger 15x15 puzzles if possible. However, he was not talking about complete mini 15x4 puzzles, rather he was referring to 15x4 units that have some legit 4-letter crossers mixed with 4-letter sequences that look like they have the potential to get extended into real words. This is why computers (and the dreaded autofill) play a smaller role in constructing these puzzles than many solvers may think.

For example, if you look closely at the top stack in today's grid, you find some good complete 4-letter words (MELS, DOSE, TAME, ORES) along with some non-words: ENAC, IMGA, AFIR, and MONI. So this top stack can only work, if a grid pattern can be found that extends those non-words into real words (for example: ENACT-, I'M GAME, AFIRE/AFIRST/MONIED, etc.

Usually at this point, the puzzle goes in my unfinished "scrap heap" pile, because a (good) matching bottom stack is next to impossible to find. However, in this case I got very, very lucky and found an earlier orphaned lower 15x4 set that fit quite nicely. So I sent a 66-word version off to Will, who rejected it saying that the stacks were "lovely", but he felt the central area of the grid was too blocky-looking and closed off. Luckily I found a solution, and an extra 15-letter entry to boot as you can see in the final puzzle.

Finally, I know there are a few too many partials in the lower half of the grid, and the "ME AT"/"MINCEMEAT" dupe sucks. But, on the plus side the 15s are reasonably lively... and there are none of those dreaded "ONES" phrases... for a change!