For decades, Mel Taub challenged readers with wit and wordplay as the longtime creator of The New York Times’s Puns and Anagrams puzzles. After he died on Sept. 14 at 97, readers responded in kind, filling the comments with their admiration of his groan-inducing puns and sharing personal memories.
In homage, a reader from Queens dreamed up anagrams of Mr. Taub’s name, and even wrote clues for them.
Mr. Taub’s first Puns and Anagrams puzzle appeared in May 1951. Over the years, he contributed some 400 more, along with the odd crossword and the occasional cryptic. His last puzzle appeared in October 2019.
Puns and Anagrams still appears every eight weeks in print in The Times Magazine, but not online. However, when we published Mr. Taub’s obituary online, we included an interactive puzzle from May 2017. Many readers completed it (in an hour or less!) and asked for more. Among them was Ellen from Philadelphia, who wrote:
“Please, please, PLEASE resume publishing Puns and Anagrams in the Puzzle Archive!!”
The Times has no current plans to start publishing Puns and Anagrams puzzles online, but for now here are three, along with a sampling of readers’ musings. Let us know in the comments how you fare.
Stumped? You can find the answers here.
Joe Siano, a former copy desk chief at The Times, offered some words of encouragement:
“The great thing about a PandA is that it rewards persistence. Very often, on the first few pass-throughs, I think I’m never going to figure it out. But if I stick with it, the dominoes start to fall and I wind up with a great sense of satisfaction. It’s a real test of your love of words. Long may it keep puzzling us.”
Want to double check your work? The answers can be found here.
Fred from New York City shared this personal anecdote after reading Mr. Taub’s obituary:
“Many years ago, I interviewed Mr. Taub for an article about him in the Brooklyn College Alumni Magazine. He told me that he always rode in the same car on the subway and would often sit across from a woman working the New York Times Crossword, as he was. They didn’t speak but would acknowledge each other and he would nod as he got off the train at Times Square. One day, he opened the paper and found it was one of his puzzles, so while the woman glanced at him, he quickly filled in all the answers, held up the page for her to see and smiled sweetly. He said he always remembered the look of shocked surprise on the woman’s face as he got off the train. I guess once a trickster, always a trickster.”
Keep trying! But if you need some help, the answers can be found here.
Amisha Padnani is an obituaries editor and the creator of Overlooked, a series that tells the stories of remarkable people whose deaths were not originally reported by The Times.
The post You Asked for More of Mel Taub’s Puzzles. Here Are Three. appeared first on New York Times.
