Joy of Jigsaws: A Puzzler's Guide and How to Make Your Own

By Holly Lambert

Are you already a puzzle fan? Or do you want to find a new hobby? Have you ever wondered how to make your own jigsaw puzzles or simply broaden your puzzling hobby? Then here is a book for you! Whether you are an avid fan or a beginner, this book will equip you with everything you need to know about the much-loved jigsaw puzzle as well as how to make your very own creations. Whilst providing information on the history of puzzles, benefits of puzzles and even some puzzle trivia, this book will also provide you with a step by step guide to enable you to make your own puzzles. This could start with a simple cardboard puzzle cut by hand and lead to higher quality wooden puzzles cut with a craft knife or saw. Your puzzles can be whatever you want them to be and you will no longer be limited to those available in shops. Puzzling can quickly become an expensive hobby and being able to make your own should make it a more affordable one. The first of its type on the market, this book is set to show you everything you need to know and bring you into a whole new world of jigsaw puzzles!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526771438

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

DID YOU KNOW there’s an official name for a person who enjoys jigsaw puzzle assembly?

Well if you’re someone who loves jigsaws you can call yourself a dissectologist. Doesn’t that sound impressive?

Puzzles are becoming increasingly popular in today’s modern world and this book will equip with you a whole wealth of jigsaw puzzle knowledge, including how to make your very own puzzles. Not only aimed at beginners, this book will increase even the most avid puzzler’s knowledge and arm you with the information to take your hobby even further.

My very own love of jigsaws has grown massively in the last five years or so and began when my best friend and I discovered we both loved completing jigsaws. We stumbled across a lady online who was selling around sixty puzzles and leapt at the chance of getting ourselves a new collection. From there, we realised there was a huge market in the buying and selling of jigsaws and began to sell on the puzzles we had completed. We now regularly buy and sell puzzles and my mum has even joined in. With the help of my dad, I made my very first jigsaw puzzle around a year ago and have been perfecting the skill ever since!

After reading this book you will never look at your love of puzzles in the same way again!

CHAPTER ONE

THE HISTORY OF JIGSAW PUZZLES

JOHN SPILSBURY, AN English engraver and cartographer (a person who produces maps), is the known inventor of the jigsaw puzzle in 1767. He was said to have mounted a map of England onto a board of mahogany, cutting around the county borders with a handheld fretsaw. This type of saw can be used for intricate cutting work which involves tight curves and is therefore ideal for the cutting of puzzles. It is much better than other saws for this delicate work and may have been why John chose this particular implement when making his first puzzle.

An example of a handheld fretsaw

The puzzle shown below was boxed and sold for children to assemble and was originally known as a ‘dissected map’. These maps quickly became popular educational tools for the teaching of geography, but over the past 252 years their appeal as jigsaw puzzles has shown a huge increase. American children still use these puzzle maps in their geography classes and the adult world now has a great use for jigsaw puzzles as a hobby too.

The word jigsaw, however, was not used until around 1855, following the invention of the tool known as a jigsaw – jig meaning ‘rapid up and down motion’ and saw referring to the tool itself.

The image below shows one of the early dissected maps, likely to have been cut by M.H. Traubel, Lith., a map lithographer. This particular puzzle has since been donated to The American Antiquarian Society, based in Massachusetts, which is a research library specialising in American history and culture.

An example of a dissected map. (This particular image was taken from Bob Armstrong’s website. Bob spends his retirement buying, restoring, exhibiting and selling puzzles)

Due to the extensive work required to make a puzzle, jigsaws were incredibly expensive to buy. Figures from the US show that on average, in 1908, a 500-piece puzzle would cost around $5, when the average salary for a worker would have only been around $50 per month. Comparing this to the current minimum wage in England, this would equate to one puzzle now costing you around £127! If this was the case I don’t think many of us would be enjoying this hobby. Puzzles certainly would not be as popular as they are now.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, puzzles were mainly used by wealthy children and only ever had an educational purpose. The edge of the puzzle would have the only interlocking pieces, leaving the inner pieces with straight and wavy edges simply sitting next to one another. This meant completing a puzzle was far more difficult than it is today, due to their fragile nature. The chance of moving chunks around within the puzzle would also be very slim. The images below show the work of John Betts who produced puzzles between 1827 and 1875 at 115 Strand. They show an example of one of his puzzles, with the box in which they were stored. These images show how little pieces of jigsaws used to interlink with one another and makes you realise how much the market has grown in order to produce the high-quality jigsaw puzzles we are accustomed to today.

Raphael Tuck and his family played the main role in puzzles for adults during the 1900s, leading to a full-blown craze by around 1908. Raphael created a company with his sons based in London, with the Zag-Zaw line of puzzles becoming their main product. This was until the beginning of the Second World War, when sadly their production plant was destroyed in the Blitz. Raphael and his sons experimented with many different techniques of puzzle cutting, including the use of figure pieces. These wooden puzzles were time-consuming to cut, meaning the cost to buyers remained expensive, and therefore they were mainly only popular with the upper classes. All of their puzzles included unique, intricate figure pieces and were sold in only plain orange or red boxes. They also did not include any sort of picture guide, meaning every completed puzzle was a surprise, and could be a challenge to complete. This also meant customers didn’t have the opportunity to pick puzzles based on the image they liked and it was pot luck what image they would create. This is a stark difference to how we buy our puzzles today.

The box for John Betts ‘Life of Joseph’ puzzle. (These images were kindly provided by Joe ‘S’ who runs an online gallery of his jigsaw puzzle collection)