On Sat, 14 Mar 2009 19:56:36 -0700, Bob Terwilliger wrote:

> blake wrote:
>
>> apparently bill clinton and jon stewart are big will shortz and NYT puzzle
>> fans.
>
> I'm also a fan of Will Shortz. I used to subscribe to "Games" magazine, and
> a significant number of the puzzles had been put together by him. He's been
> doing it for years and years, and he's still going strong. I think the guy
> ought to be a national treasure.
>
> Bob

i hear that recently he's become a sudoku maven as well:

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.
You¡¦ll find something else¡Xhis books of Sudoku, the arriviste number puzzle
that became a smash hit last year. 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¡Xnor can there be any
repeats in any of the nine three-by-three boxes that make up the whole
grid. It may sound complicated, but you can play it even if you¡¦re
completely illiterate¡Xhell, even if you¡¦re innumerate, since Sudoku doesn¡¦t
even require math. It is the ultimate puzzle for a postliterate world.

And it is making Will Shortz a mountain of cash. St. 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. 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. At the end
of May 2005, before the Sudoku storm arrived, a crossword volume was No. 1
on the charts for adult ¡§games¡¨ books, and six of the other 49 titles were
crosswords. One year later, Sudoku had wiped the slate clean: Forty of the
top 50¡Xincluding the top spot¡Xwere Sudoku books, and more than a third of
those were Shortz¡¦s.

<http://nymag.com/arts/all/features/17244/>

go figure.

your pal,
blake