I am often asked, “Why are your crosswords so much better than other people’s crosswords?” The answer—specialization! As I’ve said before, “I” am (is?) not a single person, but a collective, diverse in age, and race, and gender, and everything else imaginable, including skills. So there is a specialist for Down answers, and another, altogether different, specialist for Across answers; there are specialists for clues, for blocks, for partial phrases, for abbreviations. An entire department, with its own vice-president, handles the crosswordese. There is a letter-addition team and a letter-subtraction team, a punning team and a parsing team. Doesn’t this cost a lot? Sure it does! But you the solver deserve the best, and here at David Alfred Bywaters’s Crossword Cavalcade and Victorian Novel Recommender, the best is just what you always get.
Special thanks to test-solver Charles Montpetit for coming up with some of the theme material in today’s puzzle.
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