Listener 4865: Location, Location by Arcadia

Yes – a circular grid!

One of us has one in the pipeline so there is hope after all that circulars have not had the Black Spot put on them. Add your comments on the pros and cons of the format below …. Aracadia has made a good hand of it as well. Having some clues entered as jumbles ups the difficulty, but also opens the door to getting more thematic material in, and all the outer three rings proved to be occupied by it.

At first glance the grid looked like a combination lock, but that didn’ t seem to fit with anything in the title and preamble so it was deemed a red herring. We were told that of each pair of radial clues one would have  an extra letter from the wordplay which would generate a name, and the other a misprint in the clue (and entered jumbled) which would generate the name of something that moved from ring 1 to ring 3 (to be written in the central space: don’t forget!). Ten (more!) thematic names were to be identified (they turned out to be in ring 2) to which Matthew 7:20 was a hint: “by their fruits you shall know them”. And if that was not enough rotating rings 2-6 (OK perhaps the combination lock was sort of relevant) would put the letters of a further name into the asterisked cells and – goodness gracious – form two more of the set of names of which the ten were part.

Apart from a strong coffee, where to start with all that? Your blogger this time just started with radial one and worked their way round clockwise – and (as they live next to a cider factory) was misled by “fruits” RUSSE and SOMERSET to start thinking of apples as the theme – and there was NEWTON too. Now that really was a red herring, as further letters showed. But a deeper subliminal thought had been brewing. All those book titles. Nothing in common that we could see apart from being in a library. And there was LIB starting off the message from the misprints. Yes – the grid was (sort of) the plan of the old British Library reading room in the British Museum, where X marks the spot where your blogger sat to do a chunk of his doctoral research. And yes – the book titles were going to match up with names of their authors in the grid:

• RUSSELL                                     Principles of Mathematics
• LONDON                                     The Heathen
• STERNE                                       A Sentimental Journey
• POPE                                             Epistles to Several Persons
• NEWTON                                    Opticks
• BEDE                                            Lives of the Abbots
• HOBBES                                      Leviathan
• LEAR                                            Laughable Lyrics
• MILTON                                       Paradise Lost/Regained
• ANON                                           Sumer is icumen [in]
  and in the final grid
• BRAINE                                        Room at the Top
• GREENE                                      The Lawless Roads

We loved the compound anagrams that were generously used to integrate the titles into the clues, which were pretty tricky until the distribution of the gimmicks and their messages had been identified

• LIBRARY BRITISH MUSEUM from the misprints
• GREAT RUSSELL STREET IN BLOOMSBURY LONDON WC1B in Ring 1 (we liked the postcode) and
• NERRNIDIEGROSOASDESIG from the extra letters.

What on earth was that? It had to be another anagram and READING ROOM must be in there so the READING ROOM’S DESIGNER, Sydney SMIRKE, whose name appeared in the asterisked cells once the rings were rotated. (Having MIRK occurring only once in their rings, by design or accident, made burgling the safe a lot easier.)

That was quite a journey. As always you can find detailed analyses of the clues over at https://listenercrossword.com and it just remains to confirm Arcadia’s membership of the Listener Oenophile Club for his “cocktail sale” in Radial 29, thank him for a splendid puzzle and wish him and all our fellow solvers plenty of Pimms in this lovely weather.