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The Monday to Thursday puzzles this week were used last Saturday at the 4th annual Arlington Puzzle Festival at the Arlington (Va.) Public Library. During the past 12 months I've supplied unpublished Times puzzles for 12 events like this around the country — mostly for libraries or other nonprofit institutions. Crossword contests are happy affairs, and I'm happy to help.

– puzzle by Bruce Haight

Tom McCoy is a sophomore at Yale, co-captain of the Yale Road Running team, and a 2013 U.S. Presidential Scholar. Two of his five previous puzzles in the Times have been named "Puzzle of the Week" on XWord Info, and this one might make it three out of six. It's definitely a wow.

– puzzle by Tom McCoy

How Gareth Bain, a South African, understands American crosswords — and culture — so well, I will never understand. This is his 12th puzzle published in the Times, with more in the pipeline.

– puzzle by Gareth Bain

Is this puzzle a little hard for a Tuesday? The test-solvers thought so. But once you catch onto the clever theme, it goes faster. The clues are almost all Joel's. He's become a first-class clue-writer — precise, colorful, imaginative, sly on occasion, and modern without overdoing it. A real pleasure.

– puzzle by Joel Fagliano

Janet Bender, of Somerset, Pa., is one of the old guard of crossword constructors, starting at the Times during the end of the Maleska era (1992), and, if memory serves, appearing in Games magazine before that. I assume she constructs without computer assistance, because her submissions come with hand-printed grids. Until relatively recently, our correspondence was done entirely by U.S. mail; I don't think she had an email address. Her puzzles have a quiet, unflashy solidness that's comforting, especially on a Monday.

– puzzle by Janet R. Bender

In Mary Lou's and Jeff's manuscript for today's puzzle, they clued COGNOSCENTE (29A) as "Fortunato vis-à-vis Amontillado, e.g." I almost kept this so the clues to all three central Across answers, including 32A and 33A, would relate to Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." That would have been neat. But in the end I felt their clue sounded too strained. I went with something more general instead. (Sorry, guys!)

– puzzle by Mary Lou Guizzo and Jeff Chen

In the print edition (and maybe some other versions) of today's puzzle, the six squares in each corner of the grid, which would usually be black, have been removed instead — to accentuate the cookie's roundness visually. This sort of effect used to be common in grids in crossword magazines, but it's a rarity in newspapers.

– puzzle by David Woolf

Andrea's puzzle today does something I like. It involves a complete set of things — in this case N.B.A. teams whose names don't end in the plural -s. There's something neat about completeness that appeals to a puzzle solver's mind. Or at least my mind. And as the N.B.A. season opens tonight, this puzzle couldn't be timelier.

– puzzle by Andrea Carla Michaels

An unusual theme today that took me awhile to wrap my head around — puns involving homophones of words containing the letter Y. The Y's are all gone. Usually themes are based on what's in the grid, not what's not. But once you get it, the result is nice, and the puzzle has a perfect, explanatory title. I also like David's elegant touch of avoiding Y's anywhere in the grid, not just in the theme answers.

– puzzle by David Phillips

Evan's handsome construction today has quite a few names, some of them uncommon, which is always cause for concern — especially when they're in the same area, and especially especially when they cross. LAURIE (16A) crossing RAS (10D) may give some solvers pause, but I think "A" at the intersection is the most likely letter to guess. I also worried about SOLER (35D) crossing the difficult STINGO and ROLEO. Evan's clue for SOLER was "Baroque composer Padre Antonio __," who, I have to admit, I'm not familiar with. So I changed this to something more inferable, even if it's rare. Overall Evan writes excellent clues. The ones here for 15A, 36A, 43A, 4D, 12D, and 28D are all his.

– puzzle by Evan Birnholz

John's manuscript had the overlapping three-letter parts indicated by circles. I thought that made the puzzle too easy. Anyway, I'm always in need of fresh Thursday-ish gimmicks, so the circles are gone, and — voilà — a Thursday!

– puzzle by John Farmer

I don't usually run puzzles in which the mutilated theme answers don't themselves make sense. But the reveal to this one was so charming, and the mutilations so clear, I made an exception.

– puzzle by David Poole

I've been saving this puzzle for about a year, to run around the time of the baseball playoffs and the World Series. The double nature of the theme — that the grid contains seven games and they're all seven letters long — is what sold me on this. Simple and elegant, with a funny reveal, perfect for a Monday.

– puzzle by Greg Johnson

This puzzle has an interesting history. Pawel and I went back and forth on the theme many times, as he progressively refined the idea and got better examples. In the end I thought it turned out great — very tight, with all familiar, lively phrases. He constructed the grid, I edited it, the puzzle-testers did their thing, etc. And after the puzzle went to the Times and was all set to be published ... I learned from a solver who got an advance copy that I ran a puzzle with the same theme, using two-and-a-half of the same theme entries, three years ago. :-(

Well, at least I'm consistent in what I like!

It's still a fine puzzle, with an expanded theme (Sunday-size rather than daily), and a solid construction besides. Still worth doing, I think, despite the accidental theme duplication. I hope you agree.

– puzzle by Pawel Fludzinski

Do you like the "stairstep" of CH- answers running through the middle of the grid? David's construction is very handsome, but I worry that the CH- pattern makes the puzzle a little too predictable.

– puzzle by David Steinberg

As far as I can remember this is the fourth "uniclue"-type crossword I've run in the Times. That's one in which all the clues (in the print edition anyway) appear in a single list, combining Across and Down. When two answers share a number, they also share a clue. The previous three times I did this are listed on XWord Info's latest summary page. The theme of Joel's puzzle today is similar to John's, but with 10 examples rather than seven, and some of them intersecting. Very elegant.

– puzzle by Joel Fagliano

I hope I didn't stretch this puzzle's theme conceit too far, as L'CHAIM (28A) would be an odd thing to exclaim at an Oktoberfest. But at least the theme is timely!

– puzzle by Matt Skoczen and Victor Fleming

Curiously, only 1%-2% of themeless submissions I receive at the Times come from female constructors. The genre is almost entirely handled by men. No one knows why. I think it's healthy to have diversity, though, in all ways, and I welcome more female-constructed themelesses. It's unlikely a male constructor would have used the fresh and lively ALPHA FEMALE (55A) as a seed, which is a perfect example of why diversity is a good thing.

– puzzle by Tracy Bennett

Did you notice in this puzzle that the constructor completely avoided the letter E outside of the theme answers? That's very elegant. E really does equal MC squared here, and nothing else.

– puzzle by David Woolf

Generally I maintain two to 15 months of inventory of crosswords, depending on the day of the week. This puzzle, unusually, was accepted three years ago. I held it for so long partly because its theme is of a type that's become overly common, and I like to space out examples. But, also, as the standards for acceptance have risen over the years, grids that passed muster in 2011 might not do so today. Liz's original grid had a number of unappealing entries — RCPT, TASM, ENA, I IS, S DAK, and DELPY — which increasingly put me off. They're all gone now, and I think the result is pretty smooth.

– puzzle by Elizabeth C. Gorski

I made two small grid changes in Eric's fine puzzle today. He had CREEL, a fishing basket, at 34A. It's a hardish word. I wouldn't have minded it, actually, even for a Monday, but my 22-year-old assistant, Joel, was not familiar with H. R. HALDEMAN, which intersected it. He suggested STEEL instead, and I agreed. No one should have trouble now.

Another issue was the constructor's answer TEN-K at 67A. That could have been tricky for beginners, as the number in the race name is usually rendered in digits and the hyphen is unexpected. Of course, not everything in a Monday puzzle has to be easy, as long as the crossings are fair. I don't want to baby everyone. But all in all PECK seemed like a better choice.

– puzzle by Eric Sydney Phillips

I accepted this puzzle only recently, but decided to run it quickly because of the recent death of 15D. Not that it mattered, but the puzzle just felt more timely this way. I love the quad-stacks besides, some of the best work on this sort I've yet seen.

– puzzle by Martin Ashwood-Smith and George Barany

One of my rules for crosswords is that I want the solver to understand every clue after its answer is filled in. The clue can be misleading, infuriating, maybe impossible to get without all the crossings, but once it's filled in, the solver should understand what it means. I know I hate it when I don't "get" a clue. Hence, I have some qualms about the clue for NEWSMEN ("Post office workers?") at 18D. Some solvers might wonder, after finally filling in the answer — Why would newsmen work at post offices? (rather than get that Post here is a proper name). In this case, though, qualms be damned. The clue was too good not to use.

– puzzle by Patrick Berry

This puzzle, along with Monday's (plus the Tuesday and Thursday puzzles from next week), were used last weekend at the 18th Westchester Crossword Puzzle Tournament in my hometown of Pleasantville, NY. All the money raised went to a local charity. Andy Kravis took the train up from his home in Manhattan to watch. It's a great experience to watch 60+ people race to solve a puzzle you've constructed! It's also a pleasure for the solvers to meet the constructor in person.

– puzzle by Andy Kravis

Like almost all puzzles that contain triply-checked letters, like the shaded ones here, this puzzle includes some vocabulary that is not as crisp or clean as in puzzles with regular checking. That's just the nature of the beast. I thought this puzzle's theme was cool enough to justify the AAR, the LLD'S, the SSE, the ENS, etc. The grid really doesn't have anything awful, and overall it's about as clean as it can be given the constraints.

– puzzle by Gerry Wildenberg

Should a theme come with or without a revealer? To me it depends on the puzzle. Sometimes a revealer entry — one that explains what or where the puzzle's theme is — is needed for clarity. In this puzzle, though, you're on your own. You just have to notice that the starting words in the five longest Across answers are related. If you do, you get a nice aha.

– puzzle by Ian Livengood

The Thursday-Saturday puzzles this week were all created by constructors in their early 20s, part of a new generation of puzzlemakers. I don't have any hard figures on constructors' ages, but my gut feeling is that the median age has declined by about 15 years since I started in 1993 — from around 55 then to 40 now. Someone should do a study.

– puzzle by Erik Agard