The resources I found most useful and which are most recommended for further reading are:
The blogs Fifteensquared, Times for the Times, and Big Dave’s Crossword Blog
of enormous use to cryptic newcomers and incidentally the only way of recovering half-remembered clues and devices
Don Manley’s Chambers Crossword Manual (Chambers, 2001)
the best explanation of the innards of puzzles
75 Years of the Times Crossword (HarperCollins UK, 2005)
an anniversary collection of puzzles and the reminiscences of editors, constructors, and solvers
A Clue to Our Lives: 85 Years of the Guardian Cryptic Crossword (Guardian Books, 2008)
Sandy Balfour’s stock-take of Guardian puzzles, constructors, and culture, and its sister volumes Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (Atlantic, 2003) and I Say Nothing (Atlantic, 2006)
From Square One: A Meditation, with Digressions, on Crosswords (Scribner, 2009)
a thoughtful, funny book by Dean Olsher that would be an excellent read whatever its subject matter
The Strange World of the Crossword (M. & J. Hobbs, 1974)
Roger Millington’s rambunctious tour through the state of crosswording at the age of sixty-odd
Georges Perec’s Les Mots croisés, procédés de considérations de l’auteur sur l’art et la manière de croiser les mots (Mazarine, 1979)
the playful Frenchman’s philosophy of puzzling
Tony Augarde’s Oxford Guide To Word Games (Oxford University Press, 1984)
which also has chapters on letter games, alphabet games, Scrabble . . .
Wordplay (2006)
Patrick Creadon and Christine O’Malley’s documentary about American puzzlers
Timeshift: How to Solve a Cryptic Crossword (2008)
Georgina Harvey’s BBC documentary about the UK cryptic scene
This book also draws on, inter alia, Afrit’s Armchair Crosswords: A Book for Leisure Moments (Derek Harrison, 2009); CC Bombaugh’s Oddities and Curiosities of Words and Literature (Dover, 1961); the Oulipo collection La Littérature Potentielle: Créations, Re-créations, Récréations (Gallimard, 1973); Michael Smith’s Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park (Pan, 2003); Marcel Danesi’s The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life (Indiana University Press, 2002); Ben Tausig’s The Curious History of the Crossword: 100 Puzzles from Then and Now (Race Point, 2013); the ‘pataphysicist Luc Etienne’s L’Art Du Contrepet (Pauvert, 1957); Stanley Newman’s Cruciverbalism: A Crossword Fanatic’s Guide to Life in the Grid (Harper, 2006); Peter Schwed’s Turning the Pages: An Insider’s Story of Simon & Schuster 1924-1984 (Macmillan, 1984); Gilbert Renault’s Le Livre Du Courage Et De La Peur (Aux Trois Couleurs, 1945); The New York Times crossword blog Wordplay; the Jeremiah Farrell conversation with Johnny Gee at barelybad .com/xwdthemes_110596.htm; the charity calendar puzzles at calendarpuzzles.co.uk; the articles “The Riddler: Meet the Marquis de Sade of the Puzzle World” in The New Yorker and “A Funny Thing Happened To Stephen Sondheim” in La Scena Musicale, the Inspector Morse episode “The Settling of the Sun” and the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme.
The across answers to the telekinesis puzzle, by the way, are ERDA and EYED—and here is the solution, a century later, to Arthur Wynne’s first puzzle:
Across (top to bottom): FUN; SALES; RECEIPT; MERE; FARM; DOVE; RAIL; MORE; DRAW; HARD; TIED; LION; SAND; EVENING; EVADE; ARE. Down (left to right): DOH; MORAL; REVERIE; SERE; DOVE; FACE; NEVA; RULE; NARD; NEIF; SIDE; SPAR; TANE; TRADING; MIRED; LAD.