SCRABBLE History & Gifts: National Scrabble Day

Today is National Scrabble Day. Here's a short history and some "SCRABBLE" gifts to celebrate the day.

Here's a bit of Scrabble History from Time Magazine:
Scrabble was conceived in 1938 during the Great Depression by an unemployed New York architect named Alfred Mosher Butts, who figured Americans could use a bit of distraction during the bleak economic times. After determining what he believed were the most enduring games in history — board games, numbers games like dice or cards and letter games like crossword puzzles — he combined all three. He then chose the frequency and the distribution of the tiles by counting letters on the pages of the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and The Saturday Evening Post. For more than a decade he tweaked and tinkered with the rules while trying — and continually failing — to attract a corporate sponsor. The Patent Office rejected his application not once, but twice, and on top of that, he couldn't settle on a name. At first he simply called his creation "it" before switching to "Lexiko," then "Criss-Cross Words."

In 1948 when a New Yorker named James Brunot contacted Butts about mass-producing the game, he readily handed the operation over. Brunot's contributions were significant: he came up with the iconic color scheme (pastel pink, baby-blue, indigo and bright red), devised the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles to make a word, and conceived the name "Scrabble." The first Scrabble factory was an abandoned schoolhouse in rural Connecticut, where Brunot and several gracious friends manufactured 12 games an hour. When the chairman of Macy's discovered the game on vacation and decided to stock his shelves with it, the game exploded. By 1952, Brunot's homegrown assembly line was churning out more than 2,000 sets a week. Nearly 4 million Scrabble sets were sold in 1954 alone.

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SCRABBLE GIFTS AND MORE!

Scrabble Cakes and Cupcakes:

Yarn Pillows.  I would order a J, of course, and that's worth 8 points!

I love these Scrabble Tile Macbook Decals, don't you?

Need a pencil or wouldn't this make an adorable clutch?

So maybe you want a real handbag rather than a clutch?

Scrabble Jewelry

Want to make your own Scrabble BRACELET?  Go HERE for easy instructions.


Addicted to Scrabble? Get these MUGS:

Want some Socks? These Scrabble Socks are great!

 Still wearing ties? Why not a Scrabble Tie?

 And, who wouldn't want this custom keyboard. I would!

Or, you can watch this 2004 documentary, Word Wars about Scrabble junkies.

And the final Scrabble Resting Place: