Jigsaws

 I never thought I would be writing about enjoying jigsaws.  After having bought that 42,000 piece monster and spending way too long on it only to put it back in the box, I vowed never to look at another jigsaw.  

Well, the day has come for me to look again.  It all started because of one puzzle.  This one came as a part of the Hordern-Dalgety collection that we acquired and after a bit of back and forth, it was decided that this would not be one of the 500 James kept (to be later sent on to join the collection in Florida).  As I was unboxing, I saw more and more boxes with Jigsaw written on them and was beginning to feel a bit crestfallen.  After all, I stated publicly that I needed to stop the madness I had gotten myself into. The last thing I wanted was more jigsaws that I would feel obliged to complete.  

This particular puzzle (Europe divided into its Kingdoms. London: J. Spilsbury, [c.1766]) comes with an interesting provenance and story.  The puzzle is thought to be the worlds first jigsaw. It is a hand drawn map of Europe, which was produced by John Spilsbury in 1766. The cuts are rather interesting in that they follow along the lines of the countries and waterways. One article I read states that the designer was a cartographer who produced the maps so children of aristocrats could learn the countries of Europe so when it was their turn to rule for Great Britain they would know geography. According to a recent Christie's auction, "[This is] A very rare example of the earliest known jigsaw puzzle, in remarkably fine and near-complete condition. The formulation of the earliest jigsaws, known as ‘dissected maps’, originates in John Jefferys’ A Journey Through Europe, a map game published by Carrington Bowles in 1759. Though the exact relationship between the cartographic engravers and the publishers John Jefferys (fl.1720-1750) and Thomas Jefferys (c.1710-1771) is unclear, they operated in close proximity, the former at Westminster, the latter at Charing Cross. Thomas became Geographer to the Prince of Wales from 1746, and later to the King. In 1753 Spilsbury entered into an apprenticeship with Thomas Jefferys, and may have first become acquainted with John's game at this period. Upon leaving Thomas’ employ in 1760, Spilsbury established his own business in Russel Court, Covent Garden. He appears at this address in Mortimer’s Universal Director for 1763, where he is described as ‘Engraver and Map Dissector in Wood, in order to facilitate the Teaching of Geography’. This suggests Spilsbury was already making jigsaw maps by this time, although no earlier ‘dissected map’ appears to have survived. Only one copy of the current map is known with a printed date of 1766. Linda Hannas, The English Jigsaw Puzzle (1972), pp.15-20, 84; Tooley, Dictionary 4, pp.196-7."   As our version has the date on it, perhaps this is the puzzle the author is referring to.  You can see the date stamp just below Iceland along a latitude line.

This piece measures 450mm x 480mm and is made up of 50 pieces.  (Two of which are replacement parts) it is 3.5mm thick and is paper glued to mahogany.  It comes with an oak box that has a label that gives the name of the puzzle, designer, and the year of 1766.  The cuts of this piece are along county boarders and longitude and latitude lines.  There are no fancy cut pieces in this one.  Each country is outlined in four different colors red, green, aqua, and yellow.  The scales in the upper left-hand corner list five different units of measure: British miles, Italian Miles, German Miles, Wersts of Russia and British and French Leagues.  As you can tell, I don't do a lot of these things because that fascinated me. The puzzle came from Rollo Maughfling, Arch Druid of Stone Henge.  Now how is that for a provenance!  

 I of course had to assemble it and take a photo.  Breaking my (new) rule to not assemble any more jigsaws.  

And now on to the museum progress.  Believe it or not, we have just emptied the last box that came in! This was a very happy day for me.  Now for the next task.  Alphabetizing the great room and the chest room.  I will then put all of the puzzles from our collection into the museum rooms.  I have to also redo the IPP wall as it is now very crammed in.  

We have finally finished the vase wall and it looks as impressive as we thought it would. I will only say that photos will come later when the scaffold comes down.  Every puzzle on it was photographed as it went up.  It took George and I 2 1/2 days to complete the work. 

We have engaged the services of a young man to take photos of the puzzles for us and place them all in folders so George can add them to the database.  He had two weeks off while quarantining after a cold. Thankfully he didn't have anything more sinister than that.  This is slow painstaking work.  He has to remove the puzzles from the shelves,  label unlabeled puzzle, then return them to the shelves.  As it turned out, on many of them, he also had to reassemble the puzzles.  On Saturday after watching him struggle for 1/2 an hour on a Coffin puzzle, I told him the best thing to do was to leave it for George.  I think he was grateful.  By the time this project is over, he will be quite the solver I'm sure.  When he is not working, I will be starting on one of the other rooms.  Everything in both houses needs to be photographed, and I'm quite certain this will be a multi-year project.  While James has photographed many of the puzzles, we are starting over. Mostly for ease of database entry, but also because we want to be assured that the identifier of each puzzle is visible in at least one photo of the puzzles.  We are also adding photos of the puzzles from at least 2 different angles.  In the case of the ceramics that I have just photographed, every piece has 5 photos minimum.  Some have more if I felt the internal portions of the puzzle or the base of the puzzle was of particular interest.  On one 'joke mug' I took over 15 photos.  All to be added to the database in future.  

One other thing George has plans to do is to add a section for solutions.  We would be very grateful of any 'digital donations' of solutions you may have for puzzles you have designed.  

Stay tuned for next weeks update...Same Bat time, Same Bat channel.