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Louweed thank you - I’ve read through every comment (trying to skim over hints!) seeking your helpful clarification.

SH - The misprint in 35ac is definitely d. When you sort the misprints into the appropriate order, it is the last letter of a word.

Thanks will. Went back and double checked and I had the correction instead of the misprint for 25a. Now the message makes is complete, and I'd already figured out what the message meant.

Less enamoured with this than others seem to be. The grid is not a thing of beauty and I found the scanning through all the clues to find the one I wanted repeatedly fairly annoying.

What the final message reveals and the last down answer are pretty neat, but the fact that the puzzle can be completed without appreciating the clever bit slightly detracts. Glad others enjoyed it though,

Smithsax (#47)
"Perhaps Aver should have had us write the next three words in the sequence below the grid."
I'm not sure what you mean by "...the next three words in the sequence...". Surely the end of the stanza/verse is right there in last clue?

I thought the construction of the different elements of the puzzle was very well done, Aver.
I too, however, wasn't prepared to repeatedly trawl through all the clues to find the clue to the light in the grid I wanted to work on. With my tablet, I can point the camera at the printed clues and get Android to recognise text that I saved and spend a merry couple of hours sorting clues into standard across and down order. This also helped to decode the 33 misprint mesage.

Forgot to give everyone the heads-up. By my reckoning, the next Listener puzzle will be a numerical. Yay!

smithsax
I haven't had a lot of sleep today, as you would know if you had seen my posts on the Listener 4710 thread.
I realise now that you probably meant that Aver could have left the last three words out of the clue and it still would have worked. SOZ.

Smellyharry has echoed my thoughts exactly with his comment below:

"Less enamoured with this than others seem to be. The grid is not a thing of beauty and I found the scanning through all the clues to find the one I wanted repeatedly fairly annoying."

I think I'd substitute 'very' for 'fairly'.
Given the limited thematic material in the grid, I really don't see that the deviations from symmetry were necessary.

jif73. I have to admit I did not have the relevant source material to hand when I posted the “next three words” so I did not know what they would have been. I just meant there could be a device to make sure the solver could demonstrate they had found the relevant bit and could prove that by saying what comes next. Maybe the next four words would make more sense, or as you say omitting the last bit from the clues and asking the solver to complete the segment.
(Hope that does not give too much away.)

That last directive of the crossword is kind of brilliant indeed! It would have been great if it had been built into the puzzle’s requirements, but equally, unless you know the work in question (or the quite familiar-sounding extract), you would have to read the work’s first section to stand a chance of spotting it. Wrestling with the clues in question for so long helps, with each phrase seared into your soul for different reasons…

All of which leaves me with just one query. What’s the last word of clue 7 doing? It might help with the surface, but it’s superfluous otherwise, isn’t it?

It indicates an old usage, as shown by “formerly” in Chambers