Customer Reviews

Letterati: An Unauthorized Look at Scrabble and the People Who Play It

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I read Letterati from the viewpoint of someone whose hobby is Scrabble. It is a wonderful history of how Scrabble developed from a family game to tournament play and the players who caused that to happen.

Scrabble is a relatively recent game dating from the 1930's. It became popular after WWII when it is believed that the owner of a major New York City department store saw the game and began to sell it in the store. Then some of the people that frequented the NYC game clubs -particularly one by Times Square-began to play the game competitively. They developed strategies for the game and word lists to study. Today we have books on strategy and written and electronic study tools. There are Scrabble clubs throughout the US and tournaments almost every weekend, and the game can be played online.

The author is himself a tournament Scrabble player and he knows the players that he describes. He weaves into his chronicle the history of the various companies that have owned the Scrabble brand and their different relations to it. He talks about the difficulties that tournament players have with the current owner Hasbro and its reluctance to fully support them and to overprotect its brand, as seen in the recent removal of the Scrabble lookalike Scrabulous from Facebook.

Letterati and Stefan Fatsis' "Word Freak" are two recent books on competitive Scrabble. I recommend them both.

Then go to a local club and play the game in its purest form. You can find a list of clubs on the website of the National Scrabble Association.

James Cassidy
Washington, D.C.
squire on the Internet Scrabble Club

Well-written and thorough history of tournament Scrabble in the US from a long-time player. One really has to care about the subject, though, and those who don't play tournament Scrabble or want to learn about what it's like and how it's evolved over time probably won't care enough. It's much nearer complete than the account given in Fatsis' book Word Freak. Good chapter on how players of Ping Pong freed it from needlessly stifling corporate control by altering it slightly and creating table tennis -- the parallels between Scrabble and Ping Pong are multitudinous and sometimes uncanny -- and how Scrabble might be similarly freed (although changing the game sufficiently to make this possible might itself not be possible without ruining the near-perfection created by Mr. Butts, its inventor).