New York Times, Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Arr, my puzzles always seem to be published at the times when I'm busiest! I'll keep my notes short and sweet this time.

I'd had the FORTY NINERS/FORTY NINE R'S idea for a while, but I just couldn't get the grid to fill as cleanly as I wanted. So I shoved what I had into my ever-growing "Works in Progress" folder and moved on to other crosswords. Last June, I rediscovered the puzzle and became inspired to finish it! After a bit of Crossword Compiler wizardry, I was able to make a customized word list containing only entries with at least one R, since my goal was to have 49 R's in the grid such that every entry had one or more R's. I was thrilled that MARGARET FARRAR fit into the grid, since she's one of my heroes! REARVIEW MIRROR was also a fortuitous find.

Not surprisingly, the nonthematic fill still ended up being weaker than what I usually strive for, but I decided to just go with it and write a set of clues. Having 49 R's in the clues was more of an afterthought, but I thought it would make for a nice touch. I realize that many solvers don't enjoy stunt crosswords, which is why I try to stay away from them in general. Every once in a while, though, a constructor's gotta have a little fun!

I hope you have as much fun with this puzzle as I did. Even if you hate it, I promise there are plenty of non-stunt Steinberg puzzles in store for you!

David is a strong enough constructor that I hitched when I got to the upper right corner. A barely-constrained area with ISR and the bygone UAR is by no means terrible, but I'd usually expect a better quality fill out of David. I hit a few other spots like that along the way — none of them had major flaws, but it made me more and more sure that there was a gimmick.

Sure enough, FORTY NINERS gets parsed as FORTY NINE RS, which I've highlighted below. I was impressed that David was able to get by with only minor clunkiness in this grid, given how difficult a trick like this is to accomplish. I don't care about most records of this sort, but just for comparison, here's the list of record-breaking letter counts. David smashes the old record of 30.

No doubt, there are some oddball words here, but I ended up liking most of them. I had no idea ORRERIES were models of the solar system — that's something I'll add to my vocabulary. I don't know that I'll have the opportunity to toss MAGYAR into a conversation ever, but that does feel like a word an educated person ought to know.

GASSER, not so much. When you have to tell someone how funny something is (twice!) in the clue ...

I liked how well the theme revealer worked. Perhaps it's because I'm a lifelong 49ers fan (I root for the Hawks when they're not playing them), and perhaps it's because karma finally came around and bit Colin Kaepernick in his arrogant butt. Or perhaps it's because the theme actually helped me finish the puzzle — that north section was pretty rough going, and thinking about where Rs might go led me to AFORE. (Yikes, that's quite a glob of glue.)

Nice also to get some good long fill, something often not possible with these stunt puzzles. GUITAR SOLO and BAD PERM are both great. Fun to get MARGARET FARRAR in there too.

All in all, a pretty good job of executing a very difficult task.

The previous R record, a mere 30, was set back in 2011 by Paul Hunsberger.

Mr. Steinberg is a crossword historian so he knows all about the contributions of Margaret Farrar (27 Across). He runs The Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project which has digitized every known crossword in NYT history going back to the first one in 1942.