By E. Graydon Carter

Along with diet books, cat books and advisories on how to make a profit from the coming apocalypse, there is a growing shelf concerned solely with mastering that infuriating, six-sided, six-colored, 27-part boggler with 42.3 quintillion possible combinations known as Rubik's Cube. The latest entry: You Can Do the Cube (Penguin; $1.95) by Patrick Bossert, 13, a London schoolboy who discovered the cube only this spring during a family ski vacation in Switzerland. Within five days he had mastered the monster, and later began selling his schoolmates a four-page, mimeographed tip sheet for 45-c-. An alert editor at Penguin saw a copy and persuaded the prodigy to turn pro. The 112-page result contains three dozen "tricks" for solving the cube (using logic rather than math), as well as a chapter on "Cube Maintenance" (to loosen a stiff cube, "put a blob of Vaseline on the mechanism"). With 250,000 copies of the cubist's book in print, a Penguin executive marvels: "It's the biggest, runaway, immediate success we have had since we published Lady Chatterley's Lover in paperback."

"It's a wonderful life and Balmoral is one of the best places in the world," quoth she. And why not? Diana, 20, and Prince Charles, 32, had just returned from their two-week Mediterranean honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia. Tanned and rosy, the newlyweds--he showing more leg than she in his Gordon Highlanders kilt--ventured down to a bridge by the River Dee on Queen Elizabeth II's Scottish estate. There they tarried for a session with about 50 photographers and reporters. Asked whether she made breakfasts fit for a King, Diana replied: "I don't eat breakfast." When presented with a bouquet of white heather, roses and carnations, she smiled graciously, then cocked her head and inquired: "All on your expense accounts?" The Balmoral bout yielded thousands of pictures, but that was not the kind of prints charming Diana had in mind, and so the session may be the last for a while. Said Charles: "A very happy Christmas to you all."

Was Herman Wouk, 66, presiding over a Truman Capote lookalike contest? No, just posing with some extras for the ABC-TV mini-series of his sprawling novel The Winds of War, to be aired next year. When the author dropped by during location shooting in Siena, Italy, he was written in for a nonspeaking walk-on as an archbishop. Director Dan Curtis figured there was no point in making it all play and no Wouk.

If your Scrabble vocabulary does not run the gamut from adz (a wood-shaping tool) to xylyl (an oily chemical), don't worry. Neither does Alfred Butts'--and he invented the game. An out-of-work architect during the Depression, Butts, 82, began developing it 50 years ago this month, using wood molding and blueprint paper. First known as Lexico, then as Criss Cross Words and finally, in 1946, by its current name, the game attracted a growing cult of Scrabble-rousers, until it became the bestselling word game in the world. Alfred's wife Nina regularly beat him at his own game. In one memorable match, she logged a devilishly high word score of 284 on quixotic, running through two triple-word scores. When Nina died a year and a half ago, Butts lost interest in his creation, to which he had sold the rights. Besides, says he, "I have always been described as an indifferent player. I am a poor speller."

--By E. Graydon Carter

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