Mel Taub, Creator of a Pun-Loving Puzzle, Is Dead at 97

Mel Taub, the longtime creator of the Puns and Anagrams puzzle for The New York Times — a form that involved wordplay and groan-inducing puns, of which Mr. Taub was a master — died on Sept. 14 at his home in Austin, Texas. He was 97.

His death was announced by his son Daniel.

In puzzle parlance, Puns and Anagrams crosswords, or PandAs — loosely related to the mind-melting British import known as the cryptic crossword — are considered variety puzzles, a kind of palate cleanser or side dish to the main meal, which is the classic crossword. Hardcore cruciverbalists — puzzle snobs and cryptic fanatics — look down on the form as lightweight fare, but it has its devoted fans. Its pleasures are for those who enjoy a truly terrible pun and the satisfaction of spotting a clever anagram.

Deb Amlen, a senior puzzle editor at The Times, called Mr. Taub “the king of the groaners in our puzzle family,” adding: “His puzzles were designed to put a smile on your face.”

Consider these Taub gems: “Offspring of many fodders” was a clue from a puzzle that appeared on Aug. 21, 2011. The answer: DODDERS (a type of vine in the morning glory family, according to Merriam-Webster).

Here’s another in that vein, from May 21, 2017: “Male or female, in Boston.” Answer: AGENDA. (That would be gender, spoken in a Boston accent. Oof!)

Mr. Taub, whose day job was as an underwriter for the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, made his puzzles at the dining room table in his family’s Brooklyn apartment, working on them nights and weekends. Each took about eight hours to construct and contained an average of 10 puns.

He liked to start each puzzle with a pun he had never used before, he told The Four Star Puzzler magazine in 1982. “And then I pray,” he said. (The magazine described his style of speaking as “rapid fire,” akin to that of his favorite comedians, Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, which accounts for his particular sense of humor.)

“Salad ingredient on the Titanic” was a clue he offered as an example. The answer: ICEBERG.

“Each definition is a word game in itself,” Mr. Taub told The Puzzler. “The ones I like best are those where the letters in the word to be anagrammed lend themselves to a smooth definition. For example, ‘He doesn’t have an end seat,’ for STANDEE.”

The first Puns and Anagrams puzzle appeared alongside The Times’s first crossword, in the newspaper’s Sunday magazine on Feb. 15, 1942. It was titled “Riddle Me This” and carried the byline Anna Gram, which Will Shortz, The Times’s longtime puzzle editor, believes was a pseudonym for the paper’s first puzzle editor, Margaret Farrar.

It took the 26-year-old Mr. Taub three tries to make it into the paper. His first forays were straight crosswords.

“This is an interesting puzzle,” Ms. Farrar wrote to him, in the first rejection letter he received. “And I foresee you will land in the puzzle corner. I don’t take to the crossing of djo and oont.” (“Djo” was the answer to the clue “a Japanese unit of measurement,” and “oont” the answer to “an Indian camel.”)

“I hope you’ll come again,” she added. “We pay $10 for the dailies.”

His second attempt was rejected as well, because of what Ms. Farrar considered contrived abbreviations, like “diph” for diphthong. He succeeded with his third puzzle, which was published on Oct. 24, 1954. His first PandA appeared the following May. He was paid $15.

He wrote double-crostics, too, though not for The Times, and collected them in a series of books. For The Times, he continued to create the occasional crossword, and even a few cryptic crosswords.

“Hail to the Chief,” which appeared in The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 17, 1993, was a homage to the newly elected president, William Jefferson Clinton. Mr. Clinton sent back the puzzle, completed in pen, the next day, along with a note saying how much he had enjoyed it “in between spurts of speech writing.” (Mr. Clinton’s inauguration was three days later.)

Sample clue: “The White House is her Everest.” Answer: HILLARY.

Melvin Seymour Taub was born on Sep. 4, 1928, in Brooklyn, the youngest of four children of David and Esther (Schwartz) Taub. His father worked as a part-time bootlegger during Prohibition, making slivovitz, a fruit brandy. He was later employed in a luggage factory.

Mel majored in English at Brooklyn College, hoping to be a comedy writer. When that didn’t pan out, he went into the insurance business, where he worked until his retirement at — in his own words, according to his son Daniel — 63.5 years of age. (It is perhaps not surprising that he was extremely precise.) Mr. Taub married Phyllis Spinrad, an administrator at Brooklyn College, in 1959.

In addition to Daniel Taub, he is survived by another son, Dave, and one grandson. Ms. Taub, who sold two daily crosswords to The Times, died in 2023.

Puns and Anagrams crosswords still appear every two months in The Times Magazine but are no longer online. A hundred or so of Mr. Taub’s puzzles are archived at xwordinfo.com, a website created by Jim Horne, a puzzler enthusiast.

By his own estimate, Mr. Taub contributed some 350 to 400 PandAs to The Times, his last on Oct. 20, 2019.

“He doesn’t just play with words,” Ms. Taub said of her husband, speaking to The Four Star Puzzler in 1982. “He preys on them.”