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I am ashamed. Everyone classifies them where they want. I always avoided boxing, I didn’t really consider myself an inventor. I didn’t invent the cube, I just found something existing
Ernő Rubik said modestly at the presentation of his book Our Cube yesterday afternoon at the U3 building in Graphisoft Park, when we asked about the genre of the book. (The location is not accidental, the AIT, the Aquincum Institute of Technology, founded by Ernő Rubik and Gábor Bojár, operates here, and can be called a genius educator.)
United States, Great Britain, China, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia. And of course Hungary. The 200-page book is published in these countries, most likely the largest undertaking in Libri’s existence, for which the publication of Péter Gárdos’s book Dawn Fever was perhaps only two years old.
“We started talking to Ernő four years ago,” said Ádám Halmos, founding director of Libri. “We found out that he wrote a book in 1983 that never appeared and we intended to publish it. This book is about puzzles. About an object that is in the hands of about a billion people. This cube is the metaphor, the narrator of much of everything. It was important that the work was born in English because we wanted it to be read all over the world. We wanted to find a strong British and American market, we agreed with an American publisher and then a British publisher two years ago at the end of an auction. And once China and Russia have joined the project, it looks like we can go beyond the original goal.
The 76-year-old author came to the book launch wearing a mask, so many of us only noticed that he had been with us for long minutes when he sat on the couch and, to understand what he was saying, took off the “mask.”
“The course I take at AIT, which I founded in part, was born from the same roots as Cube,” said Rubik. Design is an integral concept for me. It is necessary to know the possibilities offered by the space, this need has created the Cube. Design is not a theoretical science, but the creation of certain objects through artistic cognition. Well and the book?
Well, the book was a great challenge for me. Writing words, writing is something new for me. The designer works with material and I love tactile material that has internal laws. The word, on the other hand, is a strange matter for a designer because the words are not specific, they depend on agreements between them.
And language itself is a changing medium. The report hangs in the air and is very exciting. On the contrary, there is a fundamental difference between the book and the Cube. When I put the period at the end of the last sentence, the book is finished. The Cube, on the other hand, is infinite in this sense because it has an infinite number of solutions.
Why was the English original made and now why do you have the Hungarian translation in your hands?
The answer is simple: the cube is universal, especially its effect, it is not tied to a single language, Hungarian. He came to know and be accepted by the world. And why did I write it now? Well, one day is the time for everything. And although I prefer to look forward than backwards, at 76 years of age it cannot be ruled out that there is less left than what I have experienced so far.
Also: Cube will slowly be middle-aged, 45 years, which is certainly two deaths. English has just arrived for a symptom called midlife crisis. So, I wrote the book and when I showed it to my wife, she read it and said she liked it. And she also said that the book is what I am. I was happy about it …
We asked the Master when he felt that his work had surpassed him.
“About the turn of the millennium,” he said after giving it some thought. 2000 was a caesura for me too, I entered a new millennium as a time traveler. Look, Cube is pretty much the same age as the Internet. And it still hasn’t lost its appeal, even today, when we already live in the age of artificial intelligence.
I used to collect books on Cube, but then I quit because after a while I wasn’t winning anymore.
Let me give you an example: In 1981, for 40 weeks, a book about Cube was one of the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. And this year, almost forty years later, more than a hundred books have been published around the world on the Cube.
What is this but the definition of stardom? When I ask the Master if he considers himself a star since Cube has become an integral part of pop culture, he smiles.
– Look, I never wanted to be a star, it never crossed my mind when I started solving the Cube problem in 1974.
And that maybe I ended up becoming a star is just a consequence that I can’t and don’t want to do anything about.
Well, if we are here, I also suggest to Ernő Rubik, as a sports journalist, that until then Ferenc Puskás was considered the best-known Hungarian in the world, but now I’m not so sure. But the question drills me: do you know that Ernő Rubik is Hungarian everywhere? After all, the Cube is such a “supranational” international phenomenon.
“It is true that my nationality is mentioned everywhere in the descriptions and articles about me, but frankly, I am no longer sure that this has been realized in the minds of the billions of people who have taken the Cube in their hands so far, “the most popular logic. creator of your game.
And how correct my suggestion is is underlined by the press conference organizer when he whispers confidently: one of the journalists invited to the meeting asked in amazement: Is Rubik really Hungarian ?!
(Cover image: Huszti István / Index)
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