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quisling, I was of course referring to your post at 28!!

Well, that was a workout! Very tricky but can't have been too obtuse as it was finished (apart from relating the extra words) in a day.

Lots of reverse engineering needed to get 1a solved but quite a lot of help from the down clue letters. Once they started to look like words a lot fell into place ( being familiar with the theme helped too). The across clue letters were helped by the 'Books recur....' as I used the final couple to parse the last two knotty clues (19a and 16a had me stumped).

Nice one Deuce.

I obtained the theme from the extra letters in down clues, and it is one I revisit obsessively at regular intervals. I appreciate that this would be very hard if you were not familiar with the theme or had only encountered it in another form.

Having said that, I still found the puzzle very tough, and have not really thought about the final step at all. Moreover, I have an issue with 14 - the corrected letter seems to be wrong since it makes a mess of the first word of the instruction.

Foinaven - as quisling mentioned earlier, if you think 14 is wrong, suggest you re look at the misprint in 13a

I’m feeling satisfied by what I have achieved but am crushed by the final step. I’m not helped by having failed to see the significance of the 13 words, though I can live with that, and being unsure of the correct letters at 32 and 36, assuming 34 is corrected at the first letter in the clue. I have a pair of words and a number either side.

I see now that I’m wrong at 34. Corrected it

Aha! Think I’m there. The beauty of posting!

I’m putting this aside for now. Southern half of the grid almost full and part of the Northwest. I have jaloused the theme (actually something of a favourite for me) and can see what needs done at the final stage. But I’m not getting on the right wavelength for the clues and doing a lot of laborious reverse engineering, which is just a slog. I’ll come back after trying the IQ and EV in the hope that I will see the lights. (Apologies for that awful pun.)

Yes, I realised that soon after going out for a couple of hours.

There are, I think, two obvious things which must be shown, and I can manage that by substituting ten cells with the letters. But this destroys the puzzle and that would seem to me to be a great pity. In any case, Iit would not be a case of 'moving the letters' which implies that they are somewhere in the grid already but in the wrong place. And one of the letters I need does not even appear in the grid.

It may be true that you are “destroying” the grid, foinaven, but it’s not true that you are not moving the letters. They are all there, in the place specified. Either your gridfill is wrong or you’re attempting to show the wrong things