Simon and Schuster had a business license, an office on 37 West 57th Street, and a telephone operator. But they lacked a debut manuscript. At dinner that chilly January night, Aunt Wixie asked her nephew if he knew where she might buy a book of crossword puzzles; accounts vary as to whether she was asking for herself or for her niece. Either way, Simon was intrigued—there was no such book; maybe there ought to be—and soon he and Schuster were on their way from midtown to Newspaper Row, to consult the crossword experts of the World. Before meeting with Margaret Farrar (then Petherbridge) and her new editorial colleagues Prosper Buranelli and Gregory Hartswick (“surely a formidable trio of proper nouns,” Petherbridge to Buranelli to Hartswick), the pair looked in on their old pal, F.P.A.
“There are two friends of mine out here,” F.P.A. informed Farrar, “with an idea for a book. They’re nice guys but discourage them.”
F.P.A. was certain his colleagues would “lose their shirts.” The World, on hearing that sobering notion of a book of crosswords, pronounced it “the worst idea since Prohibition.” Sellers advised Simon and Schuster that the public wasn’t interested in puzzle books. Undeterred, the two men made an offer: Farrar, Buranelli, and Hartswick would be paid the “then-munificent advance” of $25 each to sift through the World ’s “drawerful of unpublished puzzles” and prepare fifty for the book; the authors of those puzzles would be paid nothing.
As publication drew nearer, Simon and Schuster began to have second thoughts. They might have seen galleys of their book-to-be, which lacked a traditional cover and instead nakedly displayed the collection’s first crossword, like a courtly fool stripped of his garments. The very first Down clue (called Vertical 1) came with a kind of talky preface from Farrar, Buranelli, and Hartswick, but it seemed almost designed to mock Simon and Schuster: “Now, VERTICAL 1—let’s see, an exclamation in two letters, beginning with H. Ha! Ha!” They worried they’d be pigeonholed, “typed as game-book publishers at the start” and “hooted out of the publishing business.” They spiraled, succumbing to “intimations of early bankruptcy,” felt they were courting “the disgrace of their good name,” these serious men of letters pumping the words SIMON and SCHUSTER with trivial hot air, until the letters were fat illegible balloons pricked into oblivion by a skyscraper’s spire. If the puzzle book was to enter the world stark-naked, the two men would duck beneath a cloak of pseudonymity. They set up a dummy imprint, Plaza Publishing, taken from the exchange of their telephone number: Plaza 6409.