Letterati

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.