Printer's Devilry

, the kind used by Ximenes and Azed in their puzzles A Printer's Devilry is a form of cryptic crossword puzzle, first invented by Afrit (Alistair Ferguson Ritchie) in 1937. A Printer's Devilry puzzle does not follow the standard Ximenean rules of crossword setting, since the clues do not define the answers. Instead, each clue consists of a sentence from which a string of letters has been removed and, where necessary, the punctuation and word breaks in the clue rearranged to form a new more-or-less grammatical sentence. The challenge to the solver is to find the missing letters, which will spell out a word or phrase that should be entered into the grid.

, the kind used by Ximenes and Azed in their puzzles A Printer's Devilry is a form of cryptic crossword puzzle, first invented by Afrit (Alistair Ferguson Ritchie) in 1937. A Printer's Devilry puzzle does not follow the standard Ximenean rules of crossword setting, since the clues do not define the answers. Instead, each clue consists of a sentence from which a string of letters has been removed and, where necessary, the punctuation and word breaks in the clue rearranged to form a new more-or-less grammatical sentence. The challenge to the solver is to find the missing letters, which will spell out a word or phrase that should be entered into the grid.

History

Afrit's first Printer's Devilry puzzle appeared in The Listener on 2 June, 1937 in puzzle 377. Its original preamble, setting out the rules, read as follows: Other later crossword setters have picked up the form, including Ximenes and Azed, and it has also found use in mixed puzzles that combine several different clue types on a single grid. Ximenes noted that it was one of the most popular non-plain puzzle types and typically set a Printer's Devilry every eight months, while most other puzzle types only appeared annually. The name plays on the term printer's devil, an old term for a printer's apprentice.

Examples

Like a standard cryptic crossword clue, the surface reading of a Printer's Devilry clue has nothing to do with the answer. However, a cryptic crossword clue according to Ximenean rules comprises wordplay and a definition. Neither of these are present in a Printer's Devilry. For example, in the following clue: the correct answer is INSTATE , which can be slotted into the clue to form a new sentence: "Against a telling remark, an effective riposte is difficult". To produce this sentence, a space is deleted between "a" and "galling", two spaces are added into "instate" and the dash is replaced by a comma. In his analysis of Printer's Devilry clues, Ximenes noted that it was a popular type, arguably easier than the standard cryptic but with the potential to be made more difficult by concealing the position of the break. A difficult Printer's Devilry clue can therefore involve substantial changes to the structure of the sentence, not just the addition of the clue word, as in: which must be significantly adjusted to produce the sentence: "When he was dancing at the center, I could not see Jose Limon as ticket expenses there were too high" with the clue word MONASTIC . However, the letters of the clued word always appear in order, and they always appear consecutively – the sentence is only ever broken in a single place. In Printer's Devilry clues, the surface can be ungrammatical or nonsensical, but the complete sentence should always be logical and natural. A common mistake when setting Printer's Devilry clues is to do the reverse and contrive a sentence which reads naturally on its surface, but which when combined with the answer produces a sentence that is not idiomatic and therefore is impossible to guess. An example of this, criticized by Ximenes, is: The answer to this clue is MORALE , producing the sentence "Do all the lines of tram or a level crossing always lack supervision?" – a sentence Ximenes described as "so unnatural that the clue would be almost insoluble". It is also considered poor form for the break to appear at the beginning or end of a word.

References

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1319497470 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.