Preface

It was just like any other Thursday afternoon… except that I had accidentally violated U.S. foreign trade sanctions.

Here’s the story: I was on my lunch break at work when I got a call from my bank. They asked about some of my recent transaction history, and then informed me that my bank account would be frozen for a few days while I was investigated.

What had I done wrong? Well, it turns out there was an issue with a puzzle I had bought online just a day or two earlier. Or rather, there was an issue with where I bought the puzzle from.

I buy puzzles like this online all the time; it’s become a bit of a hobby of mine. It’s usually pretty routine, but the problem with this particular purchase was that the seller was located in Southern Serbia. Unknown to me, Southern Serbia was one of several regions named in an executive order issued in 2001 by then U.S. President George W. Bush aimed at curbing extremist violence in the Western Balkans.

In my case, this meant that it was not a very good idea to have sent money there, and what I’d done could be misconstrued by the U.S. State Department as sponsoring terrorism.

This is just one of several predicaments that I’ve found myself since I started collecting puzzles about a decade ago. But despite this, I’ve managed to amass what I believe to be the largest and most complete collection of its kind in the world.

Such a sizable collection has granted me the opportunity to analyze these puzzles at scale like no others ever have, and discover previously unknown secrets about their history and construction. No other book, essay, or blog post—at least not as far as I can find—has ever collated all of this knowledge into a single place.

And so, I’ve used the skills and knowledge that I have to develop this website in the hope that others might be able to learn from what I’ve learned and even to use it as a reference when starting or managing their own puzzle collections.

I also hope to one day turn this website’s contents into a reference handbook for collecting.

“I collect puzzles”

Not that long ago, I was tracking a package from somewhere in Eastern Europe, and I knew that it would be arriving that day. At around 10am, I heard the mail knock at my front door—a weekly ritual at this point.

“You get a lot of packages from Russia!”

I laughed, “yeah, I collect Soviet puzzles.”

In fact, I’ve sent so many overseas payments through Western Union that my account has been banned for suspected fraudulent activity. I’ve tried appealing to their Global Compliance Team to explain that I’m just a humble Soviet puzzle collector and that I use Western Union because many sellers in Russia simply don’t can’t accept PayPal (updated March 2022).

My case has been repeatedly denied.

I now do my business through proxies: associates in Russia and other Eastern European countries who send payments and accept deliveries from the sellers on my behalf, and then forward the puzzles to me in the United States. I cannot tell you how grateful and fortunate I am to be able to rely on them. Dmitry and Evgeniy, if you’re reading this, большой спасибо мои друзья!

I’ve met a number of other puzzle collectors online over the years. Some based in Hungary, a few in Russia and Ukraine, one in the United Kingdom. I actually traveled to Budapest a few years ago, and before I left I reached out to one of my collector friends who lived there to let him know that I would be visiting. I asked if there was anything he thought I should make time to see during my stay, and he gave me a few recommendations. He also mentioned that he was the drummer in a cover band, and that he and his band would be playing at a cafe just a short walk from the place I was staying the night my flight landed. I promised I’d stop by, and after the show we greeted each other as best we could despite the language barrier. He then brought me up on stage, and smiled as he pointed at his fancy electronic drum set.

“This is you…” he said in slightly broken English.

“This is your cubes.”

That was my friend András, someone I had met on Ebay of all places. Over the years I’ve bought a number of cube puzzles that he’s found near his home and listed on Ebay—apparently enough to buy a high-end electronic drum set.

With his help, I’ve managed put together a pretty sizable puzzle collection. Not as large as some more famous collections out there like the Hodern-Dalgety collection, a massive collection of some forty thousand puzzles, but respectable nevertheless. In fact, I’ve spent a small fortune just on all the things that merely support my collection: dozens of custom archival-grade boxes; hundreds of acrylic boxes made specifically for me by an acrylic manufacturer in Dongguan, China; a light box set to photograph each item; and hundreds of white, three-inch cube boxes from the Container Store.

Actually, near the end of 2020 I was running low on the three-inch cube boxes, so I visited my local Container Store in San Francisco to pick up a few more. There were only ten or so boxes on the shelf, so I grabbed what I could find and went to to the front to check out. I asked the cashier if they had any more in stock that weren’t already on the storeroom floor or if they were planning to get more in soon. She scanned one of the boxes and then looked at the monitor.

“Oh I’m sorry, it seems these boxes are being discontinued!”

This was terrible news. Every single item in my collection was put into one of these boxes for safe keeping, and each box was then labeled with a unique number. They were perfect for my needs and soon it seemed there would be no more. Worst of all, it might mean that my collection would need to use more than one different kind of box—oh the humanity!

I asked her if there were any more available in any of the other Container Stores nearby. She did a quick search of the regional inventory, and it turned out there were only a total of 150 or so left spread across three different stores in a 30-mile radius.

“I’ll buy all of them,” I said to her. After a few minutes, she had added them all to my order. That weekend I drove to the stores one by one—during holiday shopping season no less—and walked out of each with dozens of boxes in tow.

My Collection

When I do anything, I tend to overdo it. Like, really overdo it. I need to be careful when getting into new things, because if I find something I like, it can very quickly turn into an obsession. Before my collection ballooned into what it is today, it all started with just one puzzle. I thought to myself, it’s kinda neat to own something so old and original. It’s like owning a piece of history!

So, what kind of puzzles do I actually collect? Hungarian Magic Cubes. A bit niche, I know. But everyone has their thing, right? These “magic cubes” are three-dimensional spacial logic puzzles invented in 1974 by Hungarian architect Ernő Rubik.

Rubik… surely that name sounds familiar. It’s because the Hungarian Magic Cube was the precursor to the iconic toy known as (the) Rubik’s Cube™, so named for its inventor.

It is important to note, however, that I actually do not collect Rubik’s Cube™. Instead, I collect the cubes that came before Rubik’s Cube™, which is to say those manufactured by humble Hungarian plastic injection molding company Politechnika (later renamed to Politoys).

I have hundreds of them. In fact, I’ve collected at least one of every known variant of these early cubes (some with over two dozen duplicates!). I believe it’s safe to say that my collection is the largest and most complete collection of its kind in the world—a title I’d be happily challenged on.

What I’ve discovered during this process, however, is that a lot of the history surrounding these old cubes is quite scattered and incomplete. There’s not a single source of information where one can read about all the different variants of cubes that were produced, and also all the companies and individuals who had a hand in the Magic Cube’s birth and introduction into Western markets.

With this website, I hope to change that.

Over the years, when I would come across new information, I would always file it away for my own personal reference. But now that I have such a large central repository of knowledge at my disposal, I want to share everything I’ve learned.

This Website

On this website, I will attempt to compile all of the information I’ve gathered together into a single place. My goal is to catalog all known variants of the Hungarian Magic Cube, analyze them, and explore those who saw the potential in Mr. Rubik’s puzzle and helped bring it to the rest of the world.

Much of the history you will read about has been adapted from a number of different reliable sources: The TwistyPuzzles.com online forum, a place where collectors such as myself can collaborate on the history of the Cube; Cubic Circular, a quarterly newsletter published between 1981 and 1985 written by David Singmaster; Rubik’s Cubic Compendium, by Ernő Rubik, et. al.; Cubed: The Story of Us All, by Ernő Rubik; and various other writings by notable figures such as Olivér Nagy, James Dalgety (you might recognize Mr. Dalgety’s name from the Hodern-Dalgety collection I mentioned earlier), and Geert Hellings. Their writings and insight have been invaluable, and the content on this website might not have been possible without them.