Cryptic All-Stars

Double issue of The Nation last week; no new puzzle this week.  I've been working through “The Merry Old Land Of O’s” by Patrick Berry, and the sample mentioned below.  

I'm a week late for this considering that the baseball All-Star Game was last week.  However, I'm not too late to encourage you to help get the Cryptic All-Stars their last thousand dollars through Kickstarter.  Roger Wolff has brought together a dozen constructors for a proposed book of variety cryptics.  The team includes Trazom, Henry Hook, Zebraboy, Slik, Roy Leban, and more.

The Kickstarter deadline is July 30, and if the project reaches its goal, Wolff will go ahead and commission the puzzles.  He estimates that they'll be ready by December, with the printed books done in February 2014.  Here’s a sample.

There’ll be 45 puzzles.  It’s 25 bucks if you want the electronic version, 40 for print.  Donate more and you get souvenirs or a call-out in the book.  It's not cheap compared to the books that are out there (like Wolff's own), but it's also more remunerative to the constructors with a lot fewer middlemen taking their cuts.

Cash is always a nice incentive for constructors to give us more puzzles, and for more to get into the game.  One more good thing about a project like this is it gives you a chance to try out puzzles from different constructors, and find out whose you like and whose you don't like.