Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, owners of the world's largest collection of mechanical puzzles – physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while searching for a solution. In total, the Miller Collection (an accumulation of collections and collections of collections) numbers more than 80,000 puzzles. It is made up of about five thousand Rubik's cubes, including a 2-by-2-by-2 representation of Darth Vader's head. And there are more than 7,000 wooden puzzles, like the interlocking polyhedral creations of Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker; They evoke a hybrid of pine cone and snowflake and are Mr. Miller's favorites. Ms. Miller likes her 140 brass, bronze and gold puzzle sculptures by Spanish artist Miguel Berrocal; Goliath, a 79-piece male torso, is “a puzzle that every puzzle maker craves,” she said.
Until recently, the Miller collection resided at Puzzle Palace in Boca Raton, Florida, occupying its mansion and a museum (a smaller house) next door. The puzzles even occupied the bathrooms. Then last year, on a whim, the Millers bought a 15th-century castle with 52 rooms in Panicale, a village in central Italy. They packed their puzzle collection into five 40-foot shipping containers and, for their own transit, booked a cruise from Miami to Rome.
Before setting sail in April, the Millers took a two-month road trip – “one last hurrah,” Miller called it – visiting puzzle-savvy friends from coast to coast. Along the way they accumulated more riddles. In Garden Grove, California, they loaded a cargo van with 58 boxes of Marti Reis, who donated her collection of popular puns by designer RGee Watkins, such as Diamond Ring, a dime with a metal ring passing through the center of the coin. . Puzzle maker Lee Krasnow, who has production facilities in Portland, Oregon, and Grand Rapids, Michigan, met the Millers at a puzzle party outside Austin, Texas, and personally delivered his famous Clutch Box to them. Made from exotic hardwoods and precision machined metals, it opens with a subtle unlocking mechanism; the goal is simply “the excitement of having opened it,” Ms. Miller said. And then, “if you're bold,” Krasnow added in an email, the goal is to “completely disassemble it into about 40 individual pieces.”
