Look Back‪!‬

In a sense Martin Gardner was the founder of Word Ways, for he suggested the idea of such a magazine to Greenwood Periodicals and proposed Dmitri Borgmann as its first editor (Dmitri had earlier supplied Martin with much material for the appendix to the Dover reprint of Bombaugh's Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature, published in 1961). After only a year as the editor, Dmitri resigned in November 1968 when Greenwood refused to pay him a salary of $5,000 per year. When Howard Bergerson, recruited by Joe Madachy (the editor of another Greenwood journal), agreed to be editor without salary, Dmitri angrily wrote him to say that he considered Howard's action "extremely hostile and downright treacherous" and that Howard would never hear from him again. In August 1969 Howard wrote me that Greenwood had decided to cease publishing Word Ways because of a $30,000 loss over its two-year life. Howard asked