Tangle Towns Tangle

For the ailing New York Herald Trib une, its "Tangle Towns" contest has been as stimulating as a double shot of whisky.

After the contest started four months ago, the paper picked up about 70.000 new readers. To win the $25,000 in prizes, contestants have to guess the names of towns in New York state represented by scram bled anagrams (see cut) and described in such clues as: "People of one religious faith from all over the state gather here for an annual meeting. It is a small country village and was first settled about 1790.* As the Trib expected, so many contestants solved the first 54 Tangle Towns that the paper started a series of tough tie-breakers." But the double shot for the Trib's circulation turned out to be the world's worst hangover for the New York Public Library. Close to 500 telephone calls a day have been flooding into the library's reference center for answers to Tangle Towns clues. Pages have been torn from atlases, and thousands of dollars worth of other books mutilated or stolen. Fights have broken out when as many as 25 people tried to grab the same volume of an encyclopedia; some eager contestants have removed source books from their proper places on the shelves, hidden them where no one else could find them. Copies of the WPA's guide to New York state have not only disappeared from the library and most of its 80 branches; its price in secondhand bookstores has soared to as much as $100 a copy. Said a harried librarian: "One day the clue had to do with Mormons and we just had to remove, the three trays in our card catalogue dealing with Mormons."

Even the rival New York Times and Daily News were having their troubles over the Trib's contest. Both papers' information services and morgues have been deluged with thinly veiled queries that would help solve Tangle Towns clues. The Public Library finally found a hangover cure. It put its own researchers to work figuring out the daily Tangle Towns answers, and gave them to anyone who asked for them.

The Trib was unconcerned over this answering service, and hinted that some of the library's solutions were wrong. In any case, it said that the contestants for the final tiebreakers would meet in the paper's offices, where no outside help will be allowed. As for the city's damaged libraries, the Trib was planning to help replace torn, mutilated and missing books.

* Solution: Quaker Street.

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