# The Aesthetics of Crossword Puzzles **Opening (not a real abstract):** Stephen Sondheim, the American musical theatre composer, used a curious example when asked to explain his craft: ‘the whole idea of art is bringing order out of chaos. It’s the organization of material and that really is what making a puzzle is’ (Zimmer, 2021). The connection between writing a musical and constructing a puzzle was not, for Sondheim, a casual one. In addition to creating some of Broadway’s most intricate musical scores and clever lyrics, Sondheim was an aficionado of crossword puzzles and is widely credited with introducing American audiences to the British-style cryptic crossword with the puzzles he made in the late 1960s for the magazine New York. Sondheim’s favourite cryptics, however, were those that appeared in The Listener, a weekly magazine put out by the BBC; as he later said in an interview, ‘Of all the publications, The Listener had the most elegant, complicated, devious, interesting puzzles’ **Authors:** [[Robbie Kubala]]