Andrew Parr: Hello, this is Andrew.

Stephen Sondheim: Hi, this is Steve Sondheim.

Andrew Parr: Hello, Mr. Sondheim. How are you?

Stephen Sondheim: Fine. Call me Steve.

Andrew Parr: Oh, thank you, Steve.

Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Podcast. I am your host, Barry Joseph. Tonight's episode will focus on Stephen Sondheim and his passion for puzzle and game magazines. As usual, we'll be joined by a guest to respond to audio clips from over 60 hours of my original interviews for the book. Now, if you're thinking, "is this episode for me, isn't this like your uncle passed and you and your cousins clear out their house and find a pile of magazines? Do we really need an hour of that?" Let me assure you, this is something else. For me, it's more like when my grandmother passed away and we found a box of letters she'd saved her entire life, and in it were letters that my grandfather had sent to her years before my father was born.

When my father read those letters for the first time , he said to me, it was like meeting a man he'd never known. Getting to understand the puzzle and game magazines collected and appreciated by Stephen Sondheim gives us insight into his interests and how his mind worked. Now, one of my favorite parts of doing deep research for a project like this is meeting so many fascinating people, and sometimes I get lucky.

The conversation doesn't end when I stop recording. They continue for days, weeks, months, and over time those interview subjects become friends. And one of those friends is today's guest, Andrew Parr. I was in a Discord channel about escape rooms when someone said, I just had to meet Andrew, and we were introduced.

All I knew at the time was that Andrew had interviewed Stephen Sondheim for a Spring 2021 issue of Games World of Puzzles magazine, producing what would turn out to be the last major interview with Stephen Sondheim about his relationship with puzzles and games. I then learned so much more about Andrew, his love of escape rooms, his passion for puzzle boxes, his expertise crafting puzzles for Games World of Puzzles magazine.

And then in June of 2024, we teamed up to pull off an international heist with Andrew at the lead and support by myself and Michael Mitnick. Andrew walked away from the Doyle auction of Sondheim memorabilia with Lot 320, which was called "Runs of Periodicals", including games and puzzle magazines and related publications.

The description in the catalog said there were approximately 10 to 15 boxes of material. 10 to 15? They had little idea what was actually in it. No one was gonna know until Andrew actually opened it up. So when I decided to do an episode of Sondheim's lifelong relationship with game and puzzle magazines, I knew the perfect person to invite.

Andrew, welcome. Is there anything you wanna correct or add to your introduction?

Andrew Parr: That was the best introduction I've ever heard about myself. I wanna hear more about myself. That was so interesting.

So how is life in Queens?

Barry Joseph: Oh, it's going quite well. The weather's good. We'll avoid the politics right now. How are things for you in Canada?

Andrew Parr: Uh, well, same, I, I think, uh, yeah, same. The blossoms are out and it's beautiful here.

Barry Joseph: So can you say a little bit more about the puzzle boxes that you make for others?

Andrew Parr: Oh, sure. I'd love to. I make Lego puzzle boxes. I have a big collection of wooden mechanical puzzle boxes, similar to what Stephen Sondheim collected. It was, quite a few years back when my son took a big interest in Lego. So we'd sit together and we'd build Lego together and we would do this right next to my collection of puzzle boxes. And, you know, playing with all these different Lego elements that have gotten so intricate and detailed and creative over the years, they're not just simple bricks anymore. I thought, it possible to create some of these locking mechanics that I have in my puzzle boxes out Lego? And so I started experimenting with the different pieces and I found it was not too difficult to create hidden locks and different ways to create mysterious puzzle boxes that way.

Barry Joseph: And I adore them. In fact, I have one of yours right in the other room sitting on our piano.

Andrew Parr: That's right. You bought one a while back. I thank you for that.

Barry Joseph: Now, we have an entire episode of the podcast series that's just about puzzle boxes. But if someone's coming in with this episode, can you say in this answer to, "what is a puzzle box?"

Andrew Parr: Yeah, it's typically a box that has no visible means of opening. So you don't see any hinges, you don't see any drawers, you don't see any doors or handles or anything. But the goal is to find a way to either tilt the box in some way, typically, it's by moving the sides or panels, to reveal a hidden compartment.

Barry Joseph: We're talking about puzzle boxes for a very particular reason. We're talking about puzzle boxes, because that was an interest you shared with Stephen Sondheim that led to you interviewing him.

Andrew Parr: That is the way we connected and there were so many things that had to happen in order for me to be sitting here talking to you, and if any of those things didn't happen we would not be friends. This would not be happening. I wouldn't be in this amazing orbit of Sondheim. And it started with a post I saw somewhere on social media from Dr. Nicholas Phillips.

He runs AffineCreations. He's an artisan in Philadelphia. He makes wooden puzzle boxes. And he posted that he was making a run of, just a very few, five or six, of something he was calling the Turing Chest. And, the way he was describing it, it just sounded like a gorgeous piece.

It was a large, complicated puzzle box, unlike anything I had in my collection. And I thought about it for a while because the price, like normally I'd pay a few hundred dollars for one of these, like palm sized puzzle boxes, but this is the size of a bread box. And it was thousands of dollars.

And I had to think about it for a while, but, his work is gorgeous and, it's such a rare piece. I thought, I gotta go for this. So, I pulled the trigger, I got this box and it was so beautiful. I wrote about it in one of my articles for Games magazine. I've been writing for them since 2011, contributing puzzles. And so this one article I was writing was about Lego and Lego puzzle boxes, but I wanted to show where my inspiration came from. And so I was showing some wooden puzzle boxes, including that one. So I showed the Turing Chest. And I didn't know much about the Sondheim world at the time. But he was a lifelong subscriber. He read that particular article and he saw that puzzle box and he also is an avid collector of fine mechanical puzzle boxes. And he's even said like he's hopeless at 3D reasoning and solving these things, but he just admires the craftsmanship and he likes to have these beautiful pieces in his collection. So he reached out to Dr. Phillips and he asked if he could get a Turing Chest as well. So yes, he of course, you don't say no. So he made, an extra copy for Steve, and then Dr. Phillips emailed me and said, "Hey, you won't believe who is in this small group of people that owns the Turing Chest."

And he told me it was Stephen Sondheim. And I said, that's amazing. He managed to connect us together. A few weeks later I got an email from Stephen Sondheim saying that "I'm a big fan of your puzzle series from Games magazine and I'd be happy to talk about puzzles with you." Mind blowing.

Barry Joseph: So before we jump from your interview with Stephen Sondheim in 2020 to the Doyle Auction in 2024, we need to go back a little bit and provide some historical context to Stephen Sondheim and his Games magazines.

Sondheim began to collect printed puzzle and game periodicals as early as his twenties, starting first with cryptic crossword puzzles. For decades, he completed one a week and then saved them. We don't know why he saved them or what they meant to him, but we do know two things. He used them as a rich resource for ideas when he was creating his own cryptic crossword puzzles, such as when he was the founding puzzle editor at New York Magazine, and he treasured them, giving a set to Will Shortz.

What we're gonna do now is go over to an interview I did with Will, as well as with Michael Mitnick and Richard Maltby Jr. That'll be talking about this relationship between Stephen Sondheim and his cryptic crosswords.

Will Shortz: And as far as puzzles go, of course he was a pioneer of cryptic crosswords, which are the British style of crossword. In a sense, it's a more sophisticated form of crossword than, than the American style puzzle. And in particular, he liked variety cryptics, not the basic kind with with black squares, but ones with bars, heavy bars, separating words. And uh, every, every variety cryptic had a theme, uh, use of some sort of word play. Um, he had been solving the really, really hard puzzles, cryp- variety of cryptics in The Listener magazine in Britain, and had be- had subscribed to The Listener and cut out the puzzle.

Michael Mitnick: The Listener was the, um, British, uh, column. Or it was a newspaper, magazine, something like that, where the cryptic crossword puzzles were first printed.

Yeah. And those are the- they would, Bernstein and Sondheim would eagerly await for the new Listener to arrive, and that's what familiarized him with cryptic crosswords.

Richard Maltby, Jr: He and Bernstein would sit in the theater at West Side Story doing British cryptic puzzles. I mean, it was a thing. Um, and, uh, in fact, one time I was at a, some sort of gala and for some reason I was seated next to Leonard Bernstein.

I mean, I was sort of verklempt, but I was sitting next to Leonard Bernstein and all he wanted to talk to me about was, was cryptic puzzles.

Will Shortz: He decided he didn't wanna subscribe to The Listener anymore for cryptics. You know, he actually sort of looked down a little on his puzzle interests. He thought it was a little demeaning for his, um, for his skills in music.

So he didn't like that widely known that he was a, a puzzle person. Uh, and sometime, within a year or two, after that article appeared in Games, he gave me his collection of Listener crosswords, which he had clipped out every week, and many of which were solved by himself starting in the late forties and early fifties.

Andrew Parr: Wow, that's interesting. I would love to see Will Shortz's library. But something that really surprised me or I didn't know about Sondheim is that he felt like he couldn't be public about his love and his craft.

Barry Joseph: So it, it's an interesting conundrum to tease apart. Sometimes, Stephen Sondheim is incredibly proud of what he did with puzzles and with games, and, you know, from him speaking with you for a major gaming publication, he was happy to talk about those things with you. Clearly, if he was embarrassed, he would not have done the interview.

And in fact, as you know, this was his second interview for that magazine, 1983, we'll talk about it. He did an interview then as well. So there's a side of himself that was happy to talk about it in a puzzling gaming context. And he also talked about it often when he was being interviewed on other topics as well.

But I think there's also something true when Will is talking about the fact that in other contexts it felt like it's not the thing he should be talking about. He's supposed to be talking about his art on the stage, his composing of music, his crafting of lyrics, and that somehow combining them into the same conversation was diminishing the importance of his musical work. I don't think he believed that to be true, but I think he probably felt that from others. 'cause nowadays we live in an age where the gaming industry is not only seen as an art, it's also making more money than almost all the other mediums combined, Hollywood, television, music, et cetera.

There wasn't a respect in the eighties or the seventies or the sixties for people who designed games or people who designed puzzles in the same way that we see it today. So if he'd started designing games and puzzles today, I'd like to think he would've felt that he could talk about his work on Broadway and his work in New York Magazine in the same conversation with the same level of pride.

But it's also possibly true that he just didn't value them in the same way.

Andrew Parr: That's, wow, that's, uh, that's very surprising. Yeah. That's a new insight that I hadn't heard before. And yeah, that's definitely surprising.

Barry Joseph: So that collection of completed cryptic crosswords, the ones he collected every week and completed them and saved them, I think was the beginning of him collecting printed games and puzzles from periodicals. And it pretty much stayed that way until the 1970s. Then he expanded beyond cryptic crosswords to other puzzle and gaming periodicals, many of them, which he then collected for decades.

And that, Andrew, is what you were bidding on at the Doyle Auction, that collection. So before we unpack that box, metaphorically and quite literally, can you say more about that auction? How did you learn there was gonna be an auction, and how did you decide that was the lot you wanted to acquire and why?

Andrew Parr: It wasn't originally the lot I wanted to acquire. What I was looking for in the auction was any of his mechanical puzzles that might have been up for auction. There were a few pieces that I knew he had in his collection that very rarely come up in puzzle auctions. And I really wanted some of these pieces and especially to know that they were his, that would've been even more special. And when that catalog finally came out, and we all spent that night just scouring through all the pages, I didn't see any mechanical puzzles. I was a little confused.

When I did see a lot, 320, I'm glad I read the details about that auction.

Yes, yes, I knew I wanted to get that. Partly because of that connection I have with the magazine. And kind of selfishly, I wanted to see my puzzles solved in his handwriting. I really wanted to see if he had seen my puzzles and I knew that he had, because in his first email to me, he said that he was a fan of my puzzle series. So, I was looking forward to, hopefully, seeing my puzzles solved by him.

Barry Joseph: And whether you did or not, we'll find out in a bit. But the reason why you still might not know is that Stephen Sondheim sometimes completed puzzles in his head. That he would tease people about it, he would tell stories about it. So just 'cause he told you he had completed your puzzles in Games magazine, it doesn't mean if you saw the very magazine he completed it in, there would be any marking on that page at all.

That the only way you were gonna find out is if you could get your hands on them. So, before the auction, there was an exhibit that's the opportunity for potential buyers or any looker-ons to come to the Doyle Auction House and see all of the lots that were going up. And so I was able to go into the back of the room where the bookshelf was full of all the collections of magazines.

And do you remember where you were when I called you that day?

Andrew Parr: Where I was? No, where was I?

Barry Joseph: You were driving back from work in your car and you said, "wait, let me pull over to the side of the road".

Andrew Parr: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: So you're in Canada on the side of the road and I am on the floor of the auction house with the boxes open, taking out the magazines on FaceTime and showing you what's there.

You and I and others were sharing with each other in advance, things that we each wanted, so that we wouldn't compete against each other. So, I think I knew you were looking for the magazines. And, I, of course, wanted one particular issue, which we'll get to in a bit.

And I saw it, I found that issue. And then I was showing you what else was there. I wasn't looking for your games, but you told me what years you had games just to see if those years were there. So I'm on the floor with my camera and I'm like, "yep, I found a 2018. I found a 2019". And that let you know that this was something you could go for.

But you told me the main reason why you couldn't bid on them, which is that you were in Canada, you couldn't pick them up.

Andrew Parr: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: So that's when I offered. I said, "listen, if you get them I'll-, I live in New York City, I'll take them home and we'll figure out how to get them to you". And you said, "well, if you do that, you can take what you want".

And I said, "I only want one thing. I want January, 1983". And you said, "yeah, absolutely". And so there we were going into the auction. I'm rooting for you in Canada, bidding online. Can you say a little bit about what the auction was like for you, from your perspective?

Andrew Parr: It's one of those things that you just kind of, the night before, you're laying in bed, "okay, I gotta sleep. Tomorrow is a very big day". I'm a teacher, high school teacher. I teach music. Ironically, I never talked with Steve about music, ever.

We have that in common. Like, we could have had conversations about it, but I never wanted to show how little I knew about what he does, even though I'm trained and I should. But, so I went into my class and all my students knew, okay, the Sondheim estate auction is happening today. And they weren't surprised when I turned on the data projector and I put it up on the screen and we all watched the auction as it unfolded. And it was slow. It was very slow. I thought we'd get through some lots pretty quick and we would get to lot 320 during the school day. We didn't. But what my students did comment on is how much people were willing to pay for a plate or a letter "S", things like that. Thousands of dollars. They were shocked.

Barry Joseph: As were we all. 20,000 for a thesaurus.

Andrew Parr: That's right. But even- we are on the inside and we know what's in the auction and we know who's bidding and who's watching, and they weren't. And so just to see, "why are they spending thousands of dollars on a plate?" And I had to explain. Okay, so I went home and I kept checking in and it was slowly ticking through. And you were there for the whole thing, weren't you?

Barry Joseph: I was there for every minute of it.

Andrew Parr: 11 hours of it. But, yeah, when my lot finally came up, I, I was shaking. I had, I remember I built myself a little lucky shrine. I had put any knick-knacks I had of Sondheim around my computer, and I was recording it on my phone while it's playing out on my computer, and my hand squeezed together begging that no one would compete against me. And, I put in my advanced bid, and again, like I was getting married that year, I didn't have the money to be throwing around at an auction, let alone the hammer fee that then almost doubles the cost of the lot. But, when Lot 320 finally came up, I remember that my reserve bid was a little over $3,000, in hopes that I would get it, and then I would figure out how to pay for it.

And the bidding opened and they started, I can't remember, 500 or so, and it quickly went up to, I think, $2,000.

So I realized, okay, I'm winning. If they're not hitting my maximum bid, that means I have the highest bid. But then it ticked up again, like 2,500, and then, oh no, someone else is competing. And it went to 3000 and that's where it stopped and that's where it sold.

They said it sold on the floor to bidder- and they said a number.

And so I went through all my registration, my account with Doyle, and I'm looking for this registration number and like, "what does winner on the floor mean?" And that's when I started texting you. I'm like, "Barry, what does this mean? Winner on the floor. I'm not on the floor, I'm at home. I don't think I won".

Barry Joseph: That's right. And so then I went up to the front desk and said, "my friend's in Canada bidding online and he thinks he bid enough to win, but he didn't get a message that said he did. Can you clarify for me?" And we, I think we got you on the phone. We gave him your information and they said, "yes, in fact, you had won".

Andrew Parr: It took a while from the hammer to when I finally got that confirmation. I don't remember if it was minutes or an hour or something, but that entire time I'm just in knots like, "did I get this? Did I not get this?" And then that sigh of relief. " Thank you, Barry".

Barry Joseph: And to clarify for the listeners, we've been talking just about the title, Games magazine, but this was a collection of games magazines. There was over a dozen titles in this. There were hundreds of individual issues , maybe a thousand. And there wasn't just a giant pile of a thousand magazines.

They were organized by boxes. They were labeled on the boxes and they were ordered chronologically within each of the box. So this wasn't just a collection of magazines or books you might have thrown on your shelf. This was a highly organized, curated collection that had clearly been taken care of with love.

And that is what I came back with my car, a few days later, to load up. How many boxes were there? Was there six boxes?

Andrew Parr: Six boxes.

Barry Joseph: Enormous. And nobody knew what was in each one. They did not come labeled. So-

Andrew Parr: But, but. These were not, like mailing boxes-

Barry Joseph: No.

Andrew Parr: -or shipping boxes. They look, when you sent me the picture, they were the size of my ottoman. Each box-

Barry Joseph: Yeah.

Andrew Parr: -was the size of the ottoman in my family room.

Barry Joseph: So we set up a time for you and me, where I would put my phone on a tripod. We'd go to Zoom so we could talk to each other, and you could see my room. And together, we unboxed the boxes to see what was in Stephen Sondheim's Magazine and Puzzle Periodicals collection. So let's go through that collection now, and let's do it chronologically by the order of which those periodicals came out.

Andrew Parr: All right.

Barry Joseph: So, we actually start the 1930s, which is when he was born, but these could not have been his, he would've been too young. It's a collection of Games Digest Magazine from 1937, '38, when he was seven and eight years old, and Bridge World from 1939. These stand out simply because unlike everything else that was in this collection that he subscribed to, and we know that in part because his name and addresses on the side, this is a collection he bought. Why he bought them or did someone give them to him? We don't know.

But those are different from everything else. 'cause now we jump to the 1970s. And that's the beginning of the things that he collected via subscription. In the 1970s, he collected a magazine from England called Games and Puzzles. It was kinda like their versions of Games magazine. And it was a monthly periodical that would talk about the latest and greatest in games.

"These are games you should buy. These are interviews. These are puzzles to try." And oh my gosh, there's so many great things inside them related to Sondheim. For example, the first article ever to really dive deep and solely focus on Stephen Sondheim in games was one in this Games and Puzzles magazine written by Eric Chalkley, who went by Apex, A-P-E-X.

And let me see if I have it here. It was called "Side by Side by Apex", already a joke on Side by Side by Sondheim, which had just come out in England at the time. And the subtitle was "Stephen Sondheim, the Lyric Poet of Broadway and Crossword Composer?" Question Mark. "Apex explains and presents a thematic puzzle composed in honor". And this is a one page article where Apex talks about his relationship with Stephen Sondheim. Apex, Eric Chalkley, being in England, Stephen Sondheim being in America.

And then it concludes with an original cryptic crossword puzzle that is designed inspired by Side by Side. And so that's the first one ever. I knew about it, but until I saw it with- myself, I, I had no idea how rich it was with detail and how creative Eric Chalkley was with the cryptic he created. The second thing is a board game advertisement that was in Games and Puzzles.

A board game advertisement placed by Stephen Sondheim. This ad says, quite short, "Wanted: Copies of Eye-Witness in good and complete condition, any reasonable price." Period, and then it gave a name and address.

The name was Stephen S., Not a second, capital S, but as if the person's name was plural, "Stephens", and then it gave his address. That's how we know it's him. 2 4 6 East 49th Street. New York. New York, 1 0 0 1 7. That's Stephen Sondheim advertising in this British gaming magazine to get this board game of Eye-Witness.

Andrew, are you familiar at all with this game of Eye-Witness? It's quite old.

Andrew Parr: No, I don't know that game.

Barry Joseph: I think it goes back to the 1950s. And it is a game of observation where you lay things on a board, there's then some variations and you have to notice what changed. Somehow he learned about it and then cared about it enough to place an ad in the periodical.

And what we know from interviews with his friends, is he did eventually get a copy of Eye-Witness. Maybe it was through this ad, maybe it was something else. And the friends talk about, in my book, about what it was like to play it with him. So getting these copies through your purchase, Andrew, of Sondheim's collection, we see all the ways that he appeared in England in Games and Puzzles magazine.

Andrew Parr: And what we know about Steve as well, from what I've read in the other magazines is that if he did see something he liked, he would set out to get it and he would-

Barry Joseph: Yep.

Andrew Parr: -Find a way to get it.

Barry Joseph: So, these magazines were a way for him, as you're describing Andrew, to tap into the latest and greatest in the gaming and puzzle world. Not only actual games, but books around games, and as you mentioned, things one might collect, like puzzle boxes, right?

Andrew Parr: Yeah. This particular publication, it must have meant a lot to him, because they were bound, weren't they? In binders.

Barry Joseph: There is a company in England that is a family business that goes back, I wanna say to the 1930s, that creates these very beautiful style of binders with nylon rope that holds the magazines in place. You might get small ones for your Playbills, you might get larger ones for magazines, and then you might get something printed on the outside by this binder that would say the contents inside.

The beautiful thing is this company is still around today. You can still get those very same binders exactly the way Stephen Sondheim did and put your own collections in them, which is what I did with some of the magazines, Andrew, that you so generously gifted to me from your collection.

Andrew Parr: And he had quite a few of those binders full. He had 22 years of- I think that's- apart from Games magazine itself- is the largest part of the collection. This lot .

Barry Joseph: Games and Puzzles was published from 1972 to 1981. And then it paused and restarted in a different form in 1994 through 1995. But before we get to the nineties, in the 1980s, we start seeing the 4-Star Puzzler.

Andrew Parr: I was young when I started reading Games magazine. I think I got my first copy when my family was going on a road trip and I went into the variety store just to find something to read, and I found Games magazine. I didn't know what it was, but the cover drew me in because it was an illustrated, I think, movie lot.

"How many movies can you identify on this cover?" So I bought that and fell in love with it. The creativity of the magazine.

So what I know about the 4-Star Puzzler. It was, kinda, additional puzzles for people who didn't get enough from the regular magazines.

They wanted something even harder than you'd find in the puzzles. So-

Barry Joseph: From Games Magazine. Is that right?

Andrew Parr: From Games magazine. And Games magazine typically is known for providing a good challenge. People that write for the magazine never think, "oh, is this puzzle too hard?"

They think, "is this puzzle hard enough?" when they submit it because the readers want that challenge. And that 4-Star Puzzler was even harder.

Barry Joseph: Now, the most important thing, of course, in the 1980s are the actual Games magazines themselves. Now, Games magazine and his collection start in 1977. Sondheim started with the first issue-

Andrew Parr: Mm-hmm.

Barry Joseph: -famously, said a few years later that he had every issue, had done puzzles in every issue. And his collection of those issues continued through its later combination with the other Games magazine sister publication, World of Puzzles until they became Games World of Puzzles and that subscription he had through to his passing. But as I highlighted earlier, the January 1983 issue was the most special one for me because it included a five page profile on Stephen Sondheim. A five page profile in Games magazine, all about Stephen Sondheim and his love of puzzles and games, the ones he made, the ones he had in his house, the ones he liked to play.

And one of those five pages was a puzzle he created for Games magazine. Now, that puzzle was actually designed based on a parlor game he created nearly two decades earlier. And we'll talk about that parlor game in the episode that's all about The Murder Game. But for now, let's talk about the rest of that interview and what it meant to Stephen Sondheim and where it came from. Hearing again from Will Shortz, who was an editor at Games magazine at the time, and the editor of the publication, Ronnie Shushan.

Will Shortz: I've met him, um, in 19- whatever the two, uh, 1982, 83, whenever that article in Games appeared, 'cause I was an editor at the magazine. And I was invited over to his apartment in, what is it, Turtle Bay? Is that, uh, the part of Manhattan where, where he lived. And, uh, so I got a tour of his house, a, a tour of his place.

There were antique games.

Ronnie Shushan: I mean, that was such a, um, unusual kind of piece for Games to be able to do for the very reason that you said. I mean, game creators, people involved in games were not celebrities, they weren't known. And to- so we didn't do people pieces. So to be able to have a legitimate reason to do a people piece on Stephen Sondheim, that was so, um, on target for our subject of games and our audience of gamers. I, that, that was just a gift. Um, and to actually- I was only in his house, um, briefly, uh, but just to be in the house and to see the, the games themselves. And to have a writer of the caliber of Dick Schapp, who you might not, I don't know if you're familiar with, uh, with Dick's work.

I mean, he's a sports journalist. He was a sports journalist, uh, broadcast and print. Um, but he was very much a people writer. He wrote about people. The people he wrote about were mostly in sports, but we knew he could deliver a really wonderful piece, which I think he did. Um, he, uh, and also he had, because he was a sports journalist, he was used to traveling in the world of celebrities. You know, he, he would be able to have a conversation with Sondheim and, and get the story. And I hadn't read it in a very long time, and I appreciated your sending it. And it was just a delight to, to reread it because the- I think he, he got fairly deep into all the things that you have described about Sondheim's involvement with games.

So one thing you should probably know about my involvement with games is part of my, um, uh, purpose in being there was so that it wasn't a magazine just for gamers, that it had a broader appeal. And so again, that piece on Sondheim enabled us to do that. And the fact that these years later, you can say from your research, which is obviously considerable, that Games was really the first place to really look at that piece of Sondheim.

Barry Joseph: And in America that was absolutely true. Ronnie was right.

Andrew Parr: Wow. That's, the thing I'm taking away from that, and, it's not a Sondheim focus necessarily, but Ronnie said that the puzzle writers weren't celebrities, which, to me is wrong because growing up reading that magazine, they were my celebrities. Will Shortz, you know, all the editors, Ronnie Shushan, R. Wayne Schmittberger, like all the names I saw, Henry Hook, Stephen Sniderman. All these contributors, they were my celebrities.

Barry Joseph: That's interesting. I think in part what she's saying is, that outside of the world of games and puzzles, as you and I were talking about earlier, creating puzzles didn't get the same respect that they perhaps deserved. Those who appreciated 'em, like you growing up reading them, you understood what they were doing and that meant a lot to you.

But to the wider world, on, like, a Johnny Carson show, let's say, it might not get that same kind of attention. I don't know, maybe you disagree.

Andrew Parr: No, it's true. I know I 've had vacations where I've been on bus tours and you're getting to know the people around you. And after talking for a while, I pull out my sketchbook, I start writing a puzzle, and they look over and they say, "what are you doing?" I'm like, "oh, I'm just writing a logic puzzle."

And that ends the conversation. Like, people don't know how to talk to you after that. That's not part of their world. So, it is true. It is kind of a niche thing. But yes, that piece and, I think Games could bridge that gap very well between puzzlers and everyone else.

Barry Joseph: And we see here, of course, Andrew, that paradox combining both what Will Shortz reported feeling or hearing from Stephen Sondheim that maybe he felt a little embarrassed about his interest in games and puzzles and developing them, and him spending four pages in an interview being profiled for how deeply he cared about not only the puzzles and games he collected, but the ones he created. To the extent that he created one to be printed in the publication itself.

And it's quite brilliant.

So let's jump up a level for a moment. He had every issue of Games magazine, pretty much, that was ever published. That's about 285 issues. Then there was the sister publication, World of Puzzles that ran from 1994 to 2014 . There's about 107 of those, and then those two titles got combined into Games World of Puzzles from 2014 to 2023, after he passed away but the subscription continued. There was about 64 of those. So put all those numbers together, and you get 456 issues of just that one set of publications. So Andrew, let's go back to what your original goal was, to see what he did in the publications. So before we talk about if he did yours, what are things that you learned about Stephen Sondheim by seeing where he did and did not mark up these puzzle magazines?

Andrew Parr: Okay. Well, I think, like you, I tried to look through every issue, every page just to see what we could learn about him. And I was really curious. I wanted to see if, while he was solving, maybe he took a phone call and maybe he wrote a phone message in there, like, "oh, call Meryl Streep, phone number."

I'm looking for anything like that. And, nothing. So, he didn't treat his magazines like drink coasters. He didn't treat them like notepads. They were research tools.

They were very dear to him, and he treated them that way. And you can tell from the way he stored them as well. Magazines were completely blank. I have notes here as well. From 1977 to 2004, he worked on 13 puzzles.

Barry Joseph: Wow.

Andrew Parr: In all that time. And so what does that tell me? And I know the magazines I think weren't even written in for the first number of years.

They were completely clean. So, was he subscribing and too busy with other things to read them or solve, or was he solving in his head like we know he did?

Barry Joseph: And I think we know he was solving him in his head, because in the January 1983 article, he was interviewed by Dick Schaap about collecting Games magazine. And he said, "I've been reading them from the beginning and I do puzzles every month". So we have him saying in the interview, 1982, that for the past five years, every month he did at least one puzzle in the magazine.

And I saw exactly what you saw, nothing. So we're looking at the puzzles he read, solved, and didn't mark up, which completely lines up with what he's always said, and other people have said in anecdotes, he often did puzzles in his head. That is incredible that we can have evidence of this. That without seeing these publications that you acquired, Andrew, we would never have proof of, and now we have the proof.

Andrew Parr: Now, what happened in 2005? That's when more markings started to appear in the magazine. So did- he never seemed like he was idle, but did he have more time to solve puzzles? Did he just find writing things down, helped him complete a puzzle?

Barry Joseph: He's also now 75 years old.

Andrew Parr: 75 years old. Okay. And he still, like you said, the variety cryptics, or maybe Will Shortz said that, the variety cryptics, they're absolutely the hardest puzzles in the magazine. Of the puzzles that he would complete entirely, those were them. He would go to the variety cryptics, if nothing else was done, those were done. In its entirety too. He wouldn't get stuck. He would complete the whole thing. And there's a lot of readers and fans of the magazine that are saying, we can't even crack those open.

How do you even start those?

Barry Joseph: Now you also mentioned, Andrew, he didn't only mark up the puzzles. In fact, many years before he started marking up puzzles, he was marking up other things. Can you talk about that? Where else did we see him marking it up and what was that for?

Andrew Parr: Yeah, every December, Games would come out with a " Games 100". So they would have the very difficult task of picking their favorite 100 board games or parlor games or any game from the previous year. And, at some point in the eighties, I think they started including electronic games as well. And Steve would go through the magazine, and just circle games he was interested in. And he really liked the electronic games. That's what I noticed from the eighties. He was interested in a lot of these handheld games. And I would just go through, seeing what we both liked. Like, there would be some computer games like Myst.

I'm not sure if you ever played Myst. It was a wonderful game from-

Barry Joseph: Oh, sure.

Andrew Parr: - Oh, you know, you know Myst. Yeah.

Barry Joseph: Yeah.

Andrew Parr: And, he had that circled. There were a lot of Infocom text adventure games from the mid to late eighties, I think, and he had those circled as well. I'm like, oh, this is in my wheelhouse. I was so excited to see him liking the same things that I really liked as well.

Barry Joseph: And in fact, one of the ones that he marked off was The Fool's Errand. The Fool's Errand was a game in the late 1980s, and after playing the game, he wrote to his creator, Cliff Johnson, just to express his admiration. And through that, they built a relationship to such an extent that the next game that Cliff Johnson created, which was called 3 in Three includes in the credits, as play tester, Stephen Sondheim. Now that doesn't mean that Stephen Sondheim learned about the game in Games magazine. It's possible he already played it and just marked it 'cause he was happy about it. But it's wonderful to see that mark in the magazine for the game of his friend, or about to become friend. And that it would lead him, at least once in his life, to be listed in the credits of a digital computer game as play tester.

Andrew Parr: And what a surprise that would be if you sat through the credits for that game and you thought, "wait, the- is there another Stephen Sondheim?"

Barry Joseph: Right, right. And he also marked up not just games to play, but also books about games. Games that were, as I mentioned, parlor games, an analysis of games. He loved books about games and while you were buying from the auction, his periodicals, there were multiple sets of his books, of his game books, because in the 1990s there was a house fire in which he lost most of his game books.

He had not just modern books about games, but historic ones as well. That was part of what he collected and he lost many of them, but so many remained and he bought many more, one must imagine, because there they were at the Doyle Auction, last seen on his bookshelf.

Andrew Parr: Yeah, it was unfortunate about the fire and for such a careful collector, the flood. Right? Because a lot of the, the, Games and Puzzles?

Barry Joseph: Games and Puzzles from England. Yep.

Andrew Parr: Were water damaged, weren't they?

Barry Joseph: That's right. Yeah. So there, there was the fire in the house and that turned the sprinkler system on. The sprinkler system destroyed many of the magazines. So, even these magazines which had been water damaged, were still so valuable to him that they were preserved. And I had to carefully separate one page from another in the way you do when two pages get wet together and then are dried.

So let's see, that was in 1995. So it was 29 years later. I'm slowly separating them so I can see what was inside each of those issues. And they were still preserved well enough for us to be able to learn something from them today.

So speaking of learning something, you got to learn something about your interview with Stephen Sondheim.

Andrew Parr: That's right, that's right. Out of his entire collection, all 400 and so issues of Games magazine, he only had one duplicate issue. It was the one where our interview appeared. I thought that was very sweet.

Barry Joseph: That is really sweet. And of course you now have that issue.

Andrew Parr: I do. I do. Of course.

Barry Joseph: And there were so many more issues. I can't imagine you kept all of them. There's too many. So tell us, what was the fate of them?

Andrew Parr: Oh, it was so wonderful getting to surprise a lot of my friends and even people I've never met, but that are puzzle constructors and our Sondheim fans. Or our just puzzle constructors and Steve had solved something of theirs. So, I ended up sending a lot of these puzzles to those people. So they would have a magazine, a pristine magazine with Stephen Sondheim's mailing address label on the cover, and they'd open up and see their puzzle solved in his handwriting. I had a lot of musical theater friends that, I got to like, they weren't puzzle enthusiasts, but just to have something that Stephen had written in just to have that connection. It's nice when I meet teenagers that are avid Sondheim fans. And so I brought one in and I surprised her. I'm like, here, Games magazine and I showed her the mailing label on the cover, and her eyes just got huge and she was so excited. So, that was a portion of the collection, just kind of sharing that, that love and excitement that, that I felt from receiving these magazines.

Because the collection sitting in your apartment was so big. Just the cost of shipping it all to me would've been ridiculous. So we separated things into piles, and we ended up donating a significant portion of it to the Strong M useum of Play in Rochester, New York.

Barry Joseph: Which is one of the great collections in the world of games and puzzles and materials about them. So if you're ever in Rochester, New York, you should always go to the Strong. But if you have time to go to the research collection, you should definitely ask to see Sondheim's Game and Puzzle periodicals.

So that's in Rochester, but where you are in Canada. Andrew, what did you choose to keep?

Andrew Parr: I kept, dozens of issues, where he did indeed solve some of my puzzles.

I found one of a contest I wrote. He had completed entirely.

Barry Joseph: What was it like to discover that?

Andrew Parr: It was, in the sense of the word, "awesome". I was full of awe, I was awestruck. I was sad. I was happy. It was a mix of emotions. It was a person I hadn't known that long. But, for someone who created so much that so many people loved, I created something that he got to enjoy for a few minutes and that felt very good.

Barry Joseph: Stephen Sondheim spent his whole life, from his twenties to when he passed away in his early nineties, collecting game and puzzle periodicals for a variety of reasons. To get access to the latest and greatest in that world, to challenge himself by trying to solve them, by using them as sources of inspiration for him to make his own.

And you and I were lucky to be part of the history of them. Coming to him over the course of his life and being aggregated and then coming through the auction, through my house to you, and then from you back out into the world. So we're very lucky to be part of their history moving through Stephen Sondheim. How has this experience of getting to dive deep into his periodicals, deepened your understanding of who he was, how his mind worked, and perhaps even about the work he produced?

Andrew Parr: The importance he put on games can be understated. From the size of his collection, the breadth of his collection, and his interests and the way he preserved it. It mattered to him. These weren't just pastimes, they were tools for research. They were tools for inspiration. They were ways for him to create, to bring his friends together and entertain his friends. And like you said, it's humbling that I'm not the guardian of his collection. I am, I'm the gatekeeper, and I'm seeing them come to me and I'm seeing them go to the people that need to see them.

Barry Joseph: Andrew, this was such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Matching Minds with Sondheim.

Andrew Parr: It was so much fun, getting to talk to you today and just remembering that great, uh, that meeting we had a year ago. Thank you so much for having me here. It's been wonderful talking to you.

Barry Joseph: And thank you listeners for joining Matching Minds with Sondheim. Hit us up on the socials, Facebook, and Instagram at Matching Minds with Sondheim, and please comment and like the podcast on whatever platform you use.

It helps us out immensely. I also would like to thank everyone who contributed behind the scenes to this episode, specifically transcription and text editing by Jenny Westfall, the musical stingers composed by Mateo Chavez Lewis, and the theme song to our podcast with lyrics and music by Colm Molloy, and sung by the one and only Ann Morrison, who created the role of Mary in Merrily We Roll Along. Until next time, remember, someone is on your side, especially when matching minds with Sondheim.

Andrew Parr: I was full of awe. I was sad. I was happy. It was a mix of emotions. I created something that he got to enjoy for a few minutes and that felt very good.