Rubikmania

Chips off the old cube

Worldwide sales of the original Rubik's Cube, the six-sided brainteaser invented by ErnOe Rubik, a Hungarian professor of architecture, have now passed the 10 million mark. Moreover, the perplexing puzzle has spawned a bountiful and profitable array of sequels, spin-offs and solution manuals that is turning into a minor industry.

In Britain, for example, the royal wedding inspired an imitation cube that shows the Union Jack on four sides and the likenesses of Prince Charles and Diana, Princess of Wales, on the other two. Because of its pictures, the royal cube is even tougher to solve than its Hungarian predecessor. While Rubik's Cube has a mere 43.2 quintillion (432 followed by 17 zeros) possible arrangements, the new British version has 88.6 sextillion (886 followed by 20 zeros) permutations.

Rubik also has come out with Son of Cube, a three-dimensional twister called the Magic Snake, which can assume the shape of a swan, saxophone or steamroller. F.A.O. Schwarz, New York City's premier toy store, sold out its initial shipment of 864 Snakes in a week. Copy-cubers have devised multicolored variations of Rubik's baffler in the shape of pyramids, octagons and cylinders. A new puzzle marketed in France called the Tower of Babel has sold 600,000 copies in three months at a price of about $12.

In publishing circles, the cubists are hotter than Harold Robbins. With 6 million copies in print, The Simple Solution to Rubik's Cube, a 64-page booklet written by Stanford Chemist James Nourse, has become the fastest-selling title in the history of Bantam Books, outpacing Jaws and Valley of the Dolls. Buoyed by the acute aggravation of frustrated cube twiddlers, Nourse's book has topped bestseller lists in the U.S. and around the world from New Zealand to Nigeria. Says John May, managing director of George's Booksellers in Bristol, England: "The cube phenomenon is the biggest thing of its kind we have ever experienced. Books on the cube are selling like mad." Even august Cambridge University Press has entered the field with Conquer That Cube.

Penguin Books has sold 1.2 million copies of You Can Do the Cube, by Patrick Bossert, a 13-year-old London schoolboy. It has also been translated into half a dozen languages, including Dutch, German, Portuguese and Japanese. Among other tips, Bossert advises that a little Vaseline strategically applied to the inside of a cube will make its parts rotate faster. He can unscramble a lubed cube in 45 seconds. His royalties so far have totaled more than $100,000, but his father plans to salt most of that money away for his son's education and other future needs. Still, classmates at his Richmond school often greet the boy with the plea, "Can you lend me a fiver?" Bossert has just diversified his fledgling business by taping a half-hour video cassette that demonstrates his cube-twirling technique.

Inevitably, the popularity of Rubik's Cube has encouraged rip-offs as well as spinoffs. Counterfeit versions are available on street corners in some American cities for far less than the normal $5 to $10 price. Ideal Toy Corp., which holds the U.S. distribution rights of Rubik's brainteaser, has sued more than 20 American companies for importing fake cubes from such places as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The beginnings of a cube backlash, though, are already apparent. Ballantine Books has published Not Another Cube Book, an anticube treatise that tells readers "How to Live with a Cubaholic" and "How to Kick the Habit." Entrepreneurs Steven and Roger Hill of Menlo Park, Calif., have produced what they call "the ultimate solution": the Cube Smasher, a plastic paddle guaranteed to pound the puzzle to bits. So far they have sold 100,000. Those who resort to the Cube Smasher may also be interested in a paperback released this month by Tor Books. Its title: 101 Uses for a Dead Cube. qed

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