For those of you who are interested in solving the acrostic in our summer issue but don’t know the rules of the puzzle, we’ve provided a short explanation from us and an approach to solving acrostics from puzzle-maker Michael Griffith. If you’d like, Wikipedia provides a detailed explanation with examples that we are not inclined to reproduce here for copyright reasons.
The short explanation (which makes more sense if you have the puzzle in hand as you read this): Answer the questions on the lines of blanks with numbers under them, then insert those letters into the grid where that number appears. Once you know the letter that corresponds with a number, you can drop that letter into every other clue’s answer space that uses the same number. Additionally, if you read down the first letter of each answered clue, you will find it spells the last name of the author and the title of the work from which the quote in the grid comes.
Some helpful advice to solving this acrostic puzzle from Michael Griffith: There are twenty clues attached. The first letters of those twenty words will end up spelling the name of the quote’s author and the title of the work from which it came. The 163 blanks will spell out the quote.
My usual strategy for solving acrostics is to run through the list of clues first to see what low-hanging fruit there is—a word or fact I know immediately. Then one starts plugging those into the grid. As suggested above, you can work in both directions—clues to grid and grid to clues. If you place an H in the middle of a three-letter word, it’s very likely that the word is “the.” If you have a one-letter word, it is almost surely I or A. One clue in my puzzle, “most” something or other, is very likely to result in an answer that ends in EST. If a clue is plural, the answer may well end in S. Etc.
The letters in my grid are merely guides to help you. 1M simply means that this letter is contained in clue M below.
The first letters of each answer will spell the author’s name and a title can also help you—if you have the first letter of three of the last five words, and they are Q-e-n, the other two words almost surely start with U and E.
As with crosswords, any clue followed by a question mark has some sort of pun or twist in it that’s being signaled. In such a case, “Season?” might be a clue for “salt.”
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