The life behind the dictionary
John S. Crosbie was born on 1 May 1920 and died on 10 January 1994. His career crossed literary magazines, radio, advertising, Canadian periodical leadership, book publishing, and a late-life campaign to make people play with language.
The surviving evidence places him near the centre of Canadian magazine organisation in the 1970s. As president of the Magazine Association of Canada, he joined the effort that led to the National Magazine Awards Foundation in 1977. That institutional work matters: it establishes a professional life beyond the novelty shelf.
“A good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.”
The quotation from James Boswell appeared on the legacy biography as one of Crosbie’s favourite defences. His own approach was less defensive. He alphabetised puns, crowded them into haiku, turned them into riddles, printed them in a monthly newsletter, read them on radio and television, and organised the people who made them.
The family record
Family accounts remember wordplay as a constant presence: every word offered a possible turn. They also describe Crosbie as a Second World War veteran whose experiences shaped his later dislike of war play. The museum preserves that account as oral history; no official service file has yet been located, so the details are not presented as settled biography.
The work
Crosbie’s Dictionary of Puns appeared in Canada in 1972 and internationally in 1977. It was not simply a joke book: the alphabetical reference structure made it useful to later writers and even to computational research into how puns work.