Across the years and down memory lane
Sandy Balfour
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: 80 YEARS OF CRYPTIC CROSSWORDS by Val Gilbert Macmillan, £9. 99, pp. 280. ISBN 1405049235 your Aunt Agatha will he pleased, and so she should be. And she will show it. Your carefully con sidered choice of gift — The Daily Telegraph: 80 Years of Cryptic Crosswords — will send her tripping down memory lane, a journey likely to last all the way through Christmas lunch and quite possibly into Boxing Day. Pausing only for the Queen's Speech, for which she preserves a tight-lipped and impatient silence, rolling her eyes when Her Majesty mentions the Commonwealth', Aunt Agatha will remind you, not for the first time, how she and Uncle Oswald met when he asked her the solution to 3 down on the Number 12 bus. Of course in those days ...
And you (shame on you) will rue having given her the book at all. You should have gone with the hip flask like you planned, even at the risk of upsetting your mother.
Well, you get no sympathy here. It's your own fault and you will just have to live with it. And yes, you should have gone with the hip flask. But this does not mean it was a mistake to buy the book. The mistake was to give it away. For while Val Gilbert's 80 Years of Cryptic Crosswords is a perfect thing to give someone this Christmas, it is an even better thing to keep or to receive.
Gilbert has been at the Daily Telegraph a good long while now (she took over as crossword editor in 1977) and she brings to this collection not only her knowledge of the paper, its setters and its puzzles, but also of the place it holds in the hearts and minds of its readers. The book contains 80 crossword puzzles, one taken from each of the 80 years during which the Telegraph has published them (the first appeared in 1925) and includes one for 2005 for which three solutions are as yet unclued. Readers are invited to solve the puzzle and then make up the three missing clues. The best will be included (and credited — an unusually magnanimous step for the Telegraph) in the 'special birthday crossword' to be published on 30 July next year. There are also photographs of the Telegraph's front pages from key moments in the century.
As a rule 1 can't see the point of crossword collections. There are crosswords available everywhere we go, and more are published than we could ever solve. Why buy more? But this collection is different from others and better than most. Gilbert offers us a gently humorous introduction to each decade, the puzzles are carefully chosen and well presented and the book itself is superbly designed. A book to keep. not to give away.
So perhaps there is a way forward. Wait until Aunt Agatha has nodded off beside the fire and prise it gently from her hands. Read it — it doesn't take that long — after which you may or may not want to solve all the puzzles. By today's standards some of the early ones are pretty dreadful. Still, give them a go. And if you play your cards right, Aunt Agatha will never notice it's gone. She is getting on a bit, after all.
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