Randall Rothenberg in the New York Times (1988-08-10) writes that although “Puzzle Makers Exchange Cross Words” about the fall of ERNE and ESNE and the rise of XEROX and PEACE PLAN, one Robert Guilbert Sr. was ignorant of the dispute two years ago when he developed a competitive crossword game called Pago Pago and first became aware of crossword fans’ passion for the pastime.

Helene Hovanec’s article “Robert Guilbert’s Crossword Academy” (CROSSW RD, Nov/Dec 1992) contains no text about Pago Pago, but does include an uncaptioned photograph of Guilbert (1911–1990) hard at work. David Steinberg of the “Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project” blog has mentioned Guilbert several times, and even received in 2016 a very nice blog comment from Guilbert’s son Jonathan. Jonathan wrote: "In the photo he can be seen working on a puzzle that he designed as a 'Moebius Strip' — an 'Infinity Crossword Puzzle' — a puzzle without a beginning and an end. He was going to have this game manufactured and marketed under the name 'Pago Pago,' I believe."

Personally I suspect that Jonathan’s hunch was wrong: that the Möbius-strip puzzle and the “Pago Pago” puzzle-game were two separate projects. However, apparently on the strength of Jonathan’s guess, the Möbius–Pago Pago hypothesis was reproduced as fact in Adrienne Raphel’s dissertation “The Crossword Mentality in Modern Literature and Culture” (Harvard, 2018): “In 1986, Robert Guilbert, a former ad copywriter from Milwaukee who enjoyed spending his retirement doing the puzzle, invented a game called Pago Pago, an infinite crossword on a Möbius strip, and began to peddle it around to crossword fans.” The same sentence appears in Raphel’s book Thinking Inside the Box (2020). The game of telephone continues in Natan Last’s Across the Universe (2025).

What does a crossword on a Möbius strip look like? A real mathematical Möbius strip is nonorientable, so letter-forms change parity when looping around. Only vertically symmetric letters work for vertical loops, or horizontally symmetric for horizontal loops. A diagonal ladder allows letters like O, X, L, W, H, C, D. The author created a three-letter ladder crossword, but it repeats entries and has awful fill. Can you come up with a better Möbius-strip crossword?