“I’m a little embarrassed by the state of this room,” said Will Shortz, The New York Times’s crossword editor, as he waded through a seemingly endless array of puzzle ephemera in his upstairs library. “The problem is, I recently lent part of my collection for use at an exhibition. I got everything back, but I haven’t put it all away yet.”
He paused, looking up from a stack of old magazines.
“Well, it’s more than that, of course,” he said. “Things are just — piling up.”
Indeed they are. Mr. Shortz’s collection includes more than 25,000 puzzle books and magazines, dating to 1534, along with pamphlets, small mechanical puzzles and other ephemeral items. It overwhelms the décor of his home in Pleasantville, N.Y., where he lives and works. A clock in his office is — well, its face is a crossword puzzle. (The hands? Two stubby pencils.) A display case in the living room holds, among other treasures, the first crossword puzzle ever published — in a 1913 Sunday “Fun” section of The New York World. Even the tiled floor in the upstairs bathroom, made of small black and white squares, calls to mind a crossword grid.