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Absolutely excellent from Shark. As someone else said, three separate PDMs for me, plus the correct ordering in both places tops it off nicely.

Not sure I totally follow the discussion on the intricacies of the end game but I think I disagree with drxx. The removed letters provide four separate examples of thing X in the four separate parts of the singular thing Y, so all seems to work fine to me.

Not really, smellyharry - they are 4 Ys, not parts of a single Y (at least as Chambers defines them) but it's a tiny negative in any case, and didn't spoil my enjoyment of the puzzle.
I had issues with some of the clues - 18a, 27a and 26d, for example - but only one of them has been mentioned (26d, I think) so either I'm missing something or Shark is being given rather more leeway here than most other setters get. If it's the latter - I wonder why? If it's the former, please accept my apologies (but I'll leave it there).

I'm normally a bit of a stickler for clues but I couldn't see anything wrong with the ones you mentioned, they all seem to work fine to me.

Chambers definitions on the 4 objects are somewhat loose so I agree with your interpretation based on Chambers. But although chambers calls them the 1st Y, 2nd Y etc, and they are sometimes referred to as such in common speech, in fact they are actually different parts of a single Y.

The only clue I harrumphed at was 26 down, as it's so obscure - assuming it does refer to the Huffman-Klinkowitz book and there isn't something more obvious we've all missed. The answer fills itself in so there's no ambiguity, but I didn't much like having to wade through a load of Facebook profiles and stuff about computer games to justify it.

Still, that's a tiny quibble in an otherwise first-class puzzle.

Richard Henry Dana Jr., surely?

But I agree, it would be nice to avoid needing to have this sort of discussion - which is not to take away from the puzzle overall.

I considered both possibilities HW7 - and came down marginally in favour of the book for reasons discussed in the May Contain Answers thread. You may well be right though.