MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

A series of cartoon puzzles were published in The Etude Music Magazine in 1917-18, credited to “Sam Loyd, master puzzler.” The real puzzle, however, had to do with Sam Loyd himself, who was not just one person, but two. The father, Sam (1841-1911), was an American polymath who successfully connected the qualitative visual worlds of cartooning and illustration with the quantitative spheres of education and mathematics. Thanks to the avalanche of new, affordable periodicals in the early 20th Century, Loyd’s work was enormously popular, widely serialized and distributed to a growing middle class, hungry for self-improvement. The Etude, a monthly magazine dedicated to private music teachers, sought to reach across class lines by bringing classical music education into middle class homes. Loyd’s cartoons and puzzles were a perfect bridge, but a strange thing happened: when Sam père died, his son and colleague, Walter, took on his father’s name and continued to publish an astonishing number of cartoons and puzzles for the next twenty-five years, including those published in The Etude. Those particular puzzles were playful in appearance, but their solutions were perhaps beyond the ability of even a highly educated musician. Why would The Etude publish puzzles that might have been frustrating for their subscribers? Did The Etude mislead its readers to believe that the musical puzzles were the work of Sam Sr.? Did the legions of devoted Loyd fans know the difference? This paper will explore the musical puzzles created by this father and son team that were, in fact, one man: Sam Loyd, Master Puzzler.