Diamino is a French word game similar to Scrabble. This version was gifted to Stephen Sondheim as a holiday present, its message arranged with the game’s own tiles.
Excerpt from the book Matching Minds with Sondheim:
Before long, Sondheim’s walls, in his first Manhattan apartment and in all homes to follow, would be covered with antique board games. For decades, their archaic art and unexpected forms would intrigue one interviewer after another.
Stephen Schiff describes his experience of Sondheim’s home in his extensive profile of Sondheim in the March 1993 issue of The New Yorker:
When you enter his five-story townhouse in midtown Manhattan, the first thing you notice, besides an enormous black poodle named Max, is his antique-game collection: on the walls, in glass museum cases, on various low tables. Most of the items look faintly sinister: here is something called Schimmel, or Bell and Hammer, and here an inscrutable British concoction, Squails, and, behind the sofa, his earliest acquisition—the ghastly New and Fashionable Game of the Jew…
“All the games you see here are very nice to look at,” Sondheim told Schiff, “and real boring.”
In my own interview with Schiff, three decades later, I asked him what it was like to sit there in Sondheim’s home in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, and how he came to understand Sondheim’s fascination with the board games on the walls around him. “These were not just games that were, you know, Wordle,” Schiff shared, referring to the web-based daily spelling challenge that became all the rage in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Many of them were antique and old and redolent of another time,” Schiff explained. The boards give one an opportunity to reflect on what we have in common with that time. Or don’t. And when it comes to what Schiff views as Sondheim’s greatest works—Sweeney Todd, A Little Night Music, the first act of Sunday in the Park with George— they are all period pieces. Schiff appreciates Sondheim’s ability to place himself into the minds of others, into their place and time, and find all the contemporary human richness evoked by their context. “He spent a lot of his creative time in that kind of past.”
What Schiff demonstrates here is that the games decorating Sondheim’s walls were often not just physical manifestations of a set of rules but an artistic encapsulation of their time.
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