#FORMER NYT CROSSWORD EDITOR WILL SERIES#

“It’s all handmade, without using any nails,” he points out as he takes me on a tour.Ĭrosswords hold much the same appeal for him. He has decorated his Jazz Age mansion in Pleasantville, New York-headquarters for his puzzle empire-with antique furniture that was designed in reaction to the industrial age. You have not a solution but the perfect solution.” But with a puzzle, you have that feeling of completion, which is very satisfying. We just jump in the middle and muddle through. “Of the natural problems we face every day, very few have concrete solutions. “Puzzle people like to put things in order and to complete things,” he tells me. Shortz is a slender, mustachioed man with a perennially impish grin-almost precisely what you’d expect a philosopher of puzzles to look like. One year later, Sudoku had wiped the slate clean: Forty of the top 50-including the top spot-were Sudoku books, and more than a third of those were Shortz’s.Īll of which raises an interesting question: Has Will Shortz’s moment in the sun arrived-just as the crossword is being eclipsed?

1 on the charts for adult “games” books, and six of the other 49 titles were crosswords. At the end of May 2005, before the Sudoku storm arrived, a crossword volume was No. Across the board, Sudoku has sold so prodigiously that it has pushed nearly every crossword book off the best-seller charts of Nielsen’s BookScan.

#FORMER NYT CROSSWORD EDITOR WILL SERIES#

Martin’s, his longtime crossword publisher, began issuing his Sudoku books last year it is now a 50-book series that has sold a mind-bending 5 million copies. It is the ultimate puzzle for a postliterate world.Īnd it is making Will Shortz a mountain of cash. It may sound complicated, but you can play it even if you’re completely illiterate-hell, even if you’re innumerate, since Sudoku doesn’t even require math.

Sudoku is the complete antithesis of the crossword: You fill in a nine-by-nine grid with the numbers one through nine so that no digit repeats in any column or row-nor can there be any repeats in any of the nine three-by-three boxes that make up the whole grid. You’ll find something else-his books of Sudoku, the arriviste number puzzle that became a smash hit last year. Yet here’s the weird thing: If you pump Shortz’s name into Amazon these days, you won’t find his many crossword books at the top of the list. They regard his puzzle as the last true showcase for elegant language, sparkling wit, and groan-inducing puns. This week, his reputation as a word-nerd hero will be cemented with the premiere of Wordplay (see David Edelstein’s review), a documentary that profiles Shortz fans as diverse as Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, and Yankees pitcher Mike Mussina. Twenty-five percent of the people who pick up The New York Times Magazine on Sundays flip to Shortz’s puzzle first. In his thirteen years at the Times, Shortz has revolutionized the paper’s immensely popular crossword. But Shortz’s fan base generally does-the millions of word freaks who revere him as the nation’s master of linguistic play. AAMES, of “Willie Aames,” turns into AIMAT AMMO becomes OLIO and NLE becomes ULA-a “diminutive suffix,” such as at the end of “spatula.” It only took him a few minutes to deftly scribble in a new tangle of words. GIJOE, great! Only five letters, yet it has a J in the middle-very pretty.” Shortz has only one complaint about the puzzle: It uses the abbreviation nle for “NL East,” which he thinks is too obscure. “See, now this grid is jam-packed with fresh uses of language,” Shortz says, sitting in his home office amid stacks of reference books like Brands and Companies 1995 and The Encyclopedia of American Cars. The crossword editor for the New York Times is giving me an advance peek at the Sunday puzzle he will publish a week later. This is a great puzzle,” says Will Shortz.

Former nyt crossword editor will