To all Fifteen Squared solvers and bloggers
kenmac has kindly given me permission to announce the recent publication of my ALL SQUARED crossword book.
The book tells of my career as a crossword compiler from my schooldays right through to commitments nowadays. Ten chapters cover the ten principal newspapers and periodicals to which I have contributed crosswords over the years with descriptions of the history of each crossword series. These chapters cover, for instance, the Reader’s Crossword in the Birmingham Mail, the Puzzler, Prospect , the FT and Guardian. I celebrate many of the famous compilers of the past such as Hubert Phillips, Stanley Watt (Lavengro), Alec Robins, Leslie Stokes, the Rev. John Graham, Roger Squires and John Caesar (Jac). I tell of my career working with some of the leading crossword editors over the past thirty years — including one outlandish megalomaniac!
I champion the work of many of my friends in the crossword world, such as Sarah Hayes, Christopher Brougham KC, James Brydon and the Hex quartet, and others too whose puzzles are regularly reviewed here in Fifteen Squared. Each chapter rounds off with some of my puzzles which have been published in each of the ten periodicals since 1962.
ALL SQUARED is available only from me direct at:
puzzler <at> btinternet <dot> com and it costs £12.99 plus £5 P&P.
Tom Johnson (aka Doc, Gozo, Maskarade) Nantwich 200925
Congratulations, Tom! Is it possible to order the book from off-island? Some of us have no access to pounds.
Try using PayPal.
I imagine P&P would be higher for the continent, and maybe some post-Brexit tariffs included as well?
I commend Tom’s book. He has had a long career full of fun.
This is a bit of a long shot, but if anyone reads this who has a means of communicating with Tom Johnson that _isn’t_ his usual email address: I just received an email from him that reads _very much_ as if his email has been compromised and Someone Who Is Not Him has both a copy of his address book and the ability to send and receive email at his address. He might like to know that.
(But for obvious reasons sending him email at that address is unlikely to help.)
Alternatively, if Tom Johnson has actually been sending emails to people whose only prior interaction has been buying his book, with subject “Catching Up!” and a question about “do you ever place orders with Amazon?”, with all the lowercase “L”s replaced with capital “I”s, then all is well and I’m wasting everyone’s time :-). But that seems improbable.
I concur with g. Definitely a scam email, so his account has been hacked. I only came on here to see if anyone has a secure way to let him know.
And, before all this I ordered the book, it’s arrived, excellent value, would recommend.
I sent a report to BT’s bad-things-reporting address and (of course) got no response at all.
Agreed that the book is excellent value. A bit more info in case anyone reading this is still on the fence:
The description here suggests “autobiography with some crosswords interspersed” but it’s more “crosswords with some autobiography interspersed.” (Which I personally am absolutely fine with.) The crosswords are generally of high quality. Strict Ximeneans may sometimes be a little annoyed. A fair range of difficulties, few super-easy and none super-difficult. The great majority are regular or thematic cryptics; there are a few exceptions (definition-only, anagrams-only, a few puzzles that aren’t even crosswords).
I had a few concerns about how the binding would cope with having the book opened enough to write in solutions. (The gutters aren’t very wide.) My copy survived entirely unharmed, but I was fairly careful with it.
My copy also had some weird printing defects on the later pages, but they didn’t e.g. make anything unreadable.
There are a number of minor errata, which I list here in case anyone finds them useful:
p24, puzzle 9, preamble: 1982 was not a leap year; should probably be 1980.
p32, puzzle 13, 12a: enumeration should be (4,5) not (5,4).
p34, puzzle 14, clue printed as 15a should say 17a; clue for 15a is missing.
p62, puzzle 24, clue 22d: I think the first word should be “One” rather than “He”.
p106, puzzle 43, clue 21d: should have “these decorations” for “those decorations”.
p114, puzzle 47, clue 43a: enumeration should be (5) not (4).
p118, puzzle 49, clue 13d: “fennel” should be “funnel”.
p174, puzzle 72, clue 27a: “loves” should be “love”.
p212, puzzle 90: clue for 5d is omitted; could be e.g. “Did well to cycle past road that caused pain in crash (9)”.
I would expect anyone interested enough in crosswords to be reading this and not absolutely impoverished to find the book much more valuable to them than its cost; highly recommended.