Letterati spans the history of competitive Scrabble in North America
from the colourful hustlers of the 1960s New York game rooms, to the
hard driving quantitative tile pushers who dominate the game today with
strategic skills and memorized vocabularies. Yet, there is more to the
history of Scrabble than just playing the game. There is a parallel plot
line that revolves around many of the top players, who over the years
have wanted to see the game develop through the outside sponsorship of
tournaments, the unfettered publication of strategy books and the
encouragement of a professional class of players. Along the way the
reader will learn about how and why the Official Scrabble Dictionary was
compiled, then expurgated in 1993, and now is sold to the public without
such words as "jew" as a verb, blowjob, or fatso, while club and
tournament players have their own word list, where some 200 such words
are legal. The book also covers the obsession that Scrabble becomes for
those who play seriously, traits that make a top player successful, how
gender affects game play, and how teen players are able to rise above
their limited educations and life experience to best their elders.
There's also a look at the Scrabble trademark and how its so-called
required protection by its owners has been used as a justification for
prohibiting outside sponsorship of tournaments, the publication of
strategy books and the growth of a professional class of players. At the
same time, the book provides a glimpse of how the players' enthusiasm
for the game has been harnessed so that they have de facto ended up
working for free on the owner's PR plantation, publicizing tournaments,
putting on promotional events, talking up the game, and sporting
Scrabble geegaws, all unwittingly helping to sell ever more Scrabble
sets.
