Enigmatic Variations No.1698 – Blanks by Eclogue

“Wordplay in each clue which does not involve theme-words or their variations generates an extra letter read in clue order, these provide a description of a text and its often repeated word. The completion of the unclued BLANKS must be deduced. Chambers Dictionary (2016) is recommended.”

1 across provided what appeared to be a nice start to this, although it turned out that half of the down entries with which it intersects were unclued, so it wasn’t the great leap it had seemed. Nevertheless, the grid filled up steadily enough, and sooner or later the first two theme words looked a lot like OLD and NEW. That made BORROWED and BLUE fairly obvious choices for the third and fourth.

I had enough of the grid completed to make it immediately clear what was going on with the variations – they were members of the thematic sets, as follows:

OLD – ROSETTA STONE, DANELAW

NEW – VIRGIN, NEOLOGY

BORROWED – LIBRARY BOOK, LOAN

BLUE – CYAN, SMALT

There were a few clues that deceived me: I initially had EMMAS for 8 down and AD LIB for 35 across. Altogether, though, it was a pretty smooth fill that fit nicely into my Sunday café visit. Thanks, Eclogue!