The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History

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Summary: The History of a Favorite Pasttime
Review: "On the face of it, a jigsaw puzzle is a ridiculous exercise in make-work and wasted time." This is the analysis of Anne D. Williams, and she ought to know. After all, she is in the opinion of puzzle-master Will Shortz "the world's foremost expert on jigsaw puzzles." She has built an academic career on jigsaws, and has one of the world's largest collections (around 8,000), and so can be counted to look at them as something more than ridiculous exercises. In _The Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing Together a History_ (Berkley Books), she has assembled (ahem - the puns about puzzles, frequent in this work, are surprisingly numerous) an appealing collection of what must have been a pastime in almost everyone's life. The appeal of the subject is therefore universal, and its aspects are here told with humor and genuine delight. Though all of us have worked on jigsaws, much of the book has to do with those who work on manufacturing the puzzles and those obsessed with putting the puzzles together, or collecting them.

American children almost all have put together maps of the United States, with each state being a separate piece (well, the little ones in the northeast often blended). In doing so, they participate in the earliest form of the jigsaw. The "dissected map" was the original jigsaw, and mapmakers were the original jigsaw manufacturers. The precise date of origin or identity of the inventor are not known, but there were jigsaw maps by 1760, and the children of King George III played with them, and maybe learned some geography. They were expensive, and so are the handmade wooden ones that are still made, maybe at $6 a piece. Such puzzles often have pieces that look like letters our silhouettes of bird, clowns, or infinite others; this was an innovation of Parker Brothers in 1908, the time of the first puzzle fad. A further fad occurred around the depression, when puzzles were taken up again by a new generation who could no longer afford the theater, who had time on their hands, and who might get some small mental lift by being able to succeed in completing a puzzle. Luxury puzzles best exemplified currently by Stave Puzzles, now patronized by the likes of Queen Elizabeth, Barbara Bush, and Bill Gates. The owner, Steve Richardson, is known as the "Chief Tormentor," and takes seriously his role in making harder puzzles, like the one of only 150 pieces that could fit together a million wrong ways and one right way. He admits he went too far in an April Fool's Day puzzle for 1989 called "5 Easy Pieces". It had only five pieces, and it was easy to put four together; the last one always proved too big to fit in. Thirty buyers took the puzzle on, at $89, and he sent refunds to them all: the puzzle wasn't too hard, it was impossible.

There are computer programs now that take a photo and change it into pieces that can be shown on your monitor. You use the mouse to move and turn the pieces into the solution. Williams obviously values the older puzzles more, but admits that with a computer puzzle, one never risks losing a piece. There are computer programs used to solve puzzles, as the designer of the fiendish "Eternity" puzzle learned after he offered a prize of a million pounds to anyone who solved it within four years. Six months of full-time computing by two Cambridge mathematicians lost him his money and the ancestral mansion he had to sell. It is only one of the amazing stories here, in a well illustrated and funny book about a happy aspect of human ingenuity.