GoKawiilRandall Rothenberg in the New York Times (1988-08-10) writes that although “Puzzle Makers Exchange Cross Words” about the fall of ERNE and ESNE and the rise of XEROX and PEACE PLAN, one Robert Guilbert Sr.
was ignorant of the dispute two years ago when he developed a competitive crossword game called Pago Pago and first became aware of crossword fans’ passion for the pastime.
“Guilbert invented the crossword-based game Pago Pago” is repeated in a news-or-magazine article reprinted sans bibliographic data on a blog from 2012-03-14. That article begins “Robert Guilbert Sr. wants to open a Crossword Puzzle Hall of Fame. Or — as Guilbert might say from force of habit — a museum, shrine, repository, gallery or pantheon of immortals.” (If you know where this article originally came from, tell me and I’ll update this post!) Anyway, that’s all I can find in print about Pago Pago.
Helene Hovanec’s article “Robert Guilbert’s Crossword Academy” (CROSSW RD, Nov/Dec 1992) contains no text about Pago Pago, but does include this uncaptioned photograph of Guilbert (1911–1990) hard at work:
David Steinberg of the “Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project” blog has mentioned Guilbert several times in connection with Guilbert’s short-lived Crossword Academy, and even received in 2016 a very nice blog comment from Guilbert’s son Jonathan and a little more via email. Jonathan wrote, in part:
In the photo he can be seen working on a puzzle that he designed as a “Moebius Strip” — an “Infinity Crossword Puzzle” — a puzzle without a beginning and an end. He was going to have this game manufactured and marketed under the name “Pago Pago,” I believe.
Personally I suspect that Jonathan’s hunch was wrong: that the Möbius-strip puzzle and the “Pago Pago” puzzle-game (whatever its nature was) were two separate projects. However, apparently on the strength of Jonathan’s guess, the Möbius–Pago Pago hypothesis was reproduced as fact in Adrienne Raphel’s dissertation “The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture” (Harvard, 2018): “In 1986, Robert Guilbert, a former ad copywriter from Milwaukee who enjoyed spending his retirement doing the puzzle, invented a game called Pago Pago, an infinite crossword on a Möbius strip, and began to peddle it around to crossword fans.” The same sentence appears in Raphel’s book Thinking Inside the Box (2020). The game of telephone continues in Natan Last’s Across the Universe (2025): “he’d invented a game called Pago Pago, an infinite crossword on a Möbius strip, and wanted to hawk it to the greats.”
But what does a crossword on a Möbius strip look like, anyway? said I to myself.
Presumably it would be a crossword that loops around on itself from bottom to top (and vice versa). A crossword that does that on all four edges would be “toroidal,” like this one (which I found on Keith Calkins’ “tori crosswords” page, although I infer that Jeff Weeks was the author):
Jeff Weeks has made a bunch of these; see this PDF from MoMath. In fact he’s even made crosswords “on a Klein bottle.” Here the right and left edges connect as before, while the top and bottom edges connect with a Möbius half-twist.
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