ANAGRAMS is one of the earliest games to be manufactured in the United States and continue through the post WWII period.
1898, McLoughlin Bros.
In the end of the 16th century (1580-1590), anagrams were described as words that could be rearranged to form secret messages. The term was also used for letters that could be arranged to make different words. “Stake” is an anagram of “takes,” “skate,” “teaks,” and “steak”; add an “e” to the letters that make “later” and you can form the word “relate.”
ca. 1910, Milton Bradley
ANAGRAMS have been found in the ancient writing of the Greeks and Romans. Also called “Jumbled Words,” ANAGRAMS are sometimes pencil and paper games with lists of letters that need to be rearranged to form words in specific categories.
Sometimes, ANAGRAMS were sold under different names, such as WORD MAKING & WORD TAKING, which was published in 1877 by the Rhode Island company of C. E. Hammett Jr. and the New York books and/or stationery company of B.M. Hammett.
(Note how the lower box apron has been sewn to keep it attached to the box.) On this unusual cover is the German phrase “Wie die Arbeit so der Lohn,” which means, roughly, “As is the work, so is the wage.” Why this German phrase was imprinted on the cover of this American game of ANAGRAMS will probably remain a mystery (the name “Hammett” is not German), but there might be clues in the German immigration to the United States at that time. According to the UK website spartacus.schoolnet, “By 1860 over 100,000 Germans lived in (New York) city and owned 20 churches, 50 schools, 10 bookstores and two German language daily newspapers”; there was an even larger German-born community in Chicago, and large centers in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. “Anti-socialist laws passed in Germany also encouraged radicals to emigrate to America. These men usually became active in politics after arriving in the United States. In 1867, Germans in New York established the first-ever socialist party in the United States.”
C.E. Hammett Jr. was either the son or brother of Benjamin Mason Hammet, who was probably born in Rhode Island, though one census report says New York. B.M. Hammett had four children, two who died before the 1900 census was taken and two daughters. He died 18 February 1904 in Brooklyn, where he resided for at least 30 years. WORD MAKING AND WORD TAKING was described as “excellent” in the 14 September 1878 Publishers Weekly. (Thanks to Eric Robinson of the New York Historical Society.)
ANAGRAMS has been a popular game in this country since the late 1800s. Boxes of letter tiles made of cardboard, wood, embossed wood, and other more exotic materials would provide hours of word making, where speed was sometimes of the essence in order to best your opponent. A “generic” game–one which was not owned by any one company or person–ANAGRAMS was produced by a multitude of companies since before the turn-of-the century. Many games can be played with ANAGRAMS, including solitaire puzzles, and competitive play using tiles to make words or add to words already formed, and employing strategies to steal letters from opponents or add on to opponents’ words.
The Embossing Company, an Albany, NY, manufacturer known for its embossed wooden tiles (tiles with raised letters or figures) was the most prolific producer of ANAGRAMS in the U.S. in the mid-1900s; the company once referred to ANAGRAMS as a game that “date[s] back to the Middle Ages,” and included solitaire rules for the rearrangement of names of things or persons to make phrases descriptive of them.
In more recent times, Selchow & Righter, a company formed in the 1860s but known more for it’s SCRABBLE game nearly a century later, specialized in word games, ANAGRAMS among them.
Wood Anagrams (Anagrams embossed on wood tiles), ca. late 1920s, Selchow & Righter
Selchow & Righter also produced JOTTO, the secret word game that employed a skill in finding anagrams.
Anagrams for the blind. Note the white paper in the background with rules to the game printed in Braille.
