Puzzles on parade

Over the months of the pandemic, I’ve collected a head-high stack of wooden jigsaws by contemporary makers. I’m nearing my 10,000th piece. (This is nothing. One impassioned puzzle-blogger has fitted over 61,000 pieces this year.) Of course, I’ve journaled quite a few of them, but it’s time for Puzzles on Parade.

At home, I have a pile of beloved old Springbok puzzles from my adolescence. They’re cardboard, but well cut and the images are gorgeous: Italian pietre dure, May from the Très Riches Heures, a Chinese plate.... With them are a few vintage wooden puzzles found at rummage sales, with surprise images (no picture on the box); some precious handcut pieces (a layered landscape in many woods; a triskelion of running hares; a standing tree I got at Interaction in Glasgow as a consolation when my luggage was lost) ; and—on long-term loan—a wooden jigsaw hand cut by “Sylvie’s” grandparents in the 1930s.

Taking Liberty as the touchstone, how do the other modern puzzlists measure up? They’re a serious gold standard: A+ aesthetically, a pleasure to handle. We’re talking quarter-inch plywood here. The pieces go in with a satisfying thwick; they stand on edge; they cohere. You can pick up most of a completed puzzle by the corner and have to shake it apart.



As you’ve seen, they have many splendid images (and others not so much to my taste, but hey, de gustibus), imaginatively chosen and beautifully printed; brilliant thematic whimsies and assemblages (that dragon!), and sometimes metamorphoses (those bottles! that stag!). And when you open the boxes, there’s tissue paper color-coordinated with the image (a nice wedding-planner touch) and that new-puzzle smell of charred wood.

Wentworth

These were the first contemporary wooden jigsaw puzzles that I found, and for a long time the only ones. I’ve accumulated quite a few of these over the years, as kind English friends have given them to me, and they turn up in museum and manor shops in Great Britain, at the Globe and the RSC, and once even in France.

And now they’re a little sad.

They feel flimsy: less than half as thick as Liberty. The pieces aren’t chunky like dominoes, but slithery and clickety like plastic counters. They fit loosely, don’t clinch, so that even lying flat on the table, the puzzles don’t cohere. If you bump into the board, they go spraying all over the room and hide behind things and blend in with the carpet.

The cuts are pretty fair, with a variety of shapes and small tricks. (They like inside straight edges, which doesn’t help with coherence.) At least they’re not the six-kinds-of-blip-and-blop you get with cardboard. But the whimsies tend to be relatively sparse and simplistic, like gingerbread men. Wentworth even resorts sometimes to drawing ink lines on them—on the image!—so you can tell what they’re meant to be. This is Not On.

Clearly the ones in Hunters in the Snow are their standard tally-ho set—top hat, horseshoe, fox—with no reference to the period or winter season. How I wished for wild boars and skating figures, crows, falcons and snowflakes!

Their chosen images are beautiful, but the repos are now and then off by just enough to nag at me: that Brueghel is rather pale, and the Vermeer I did (The Wine Glass) is brown, as if a few centuries of varnish hadn’t been removed. That puzzle was redeemed by some pretty, witty whimsy ideas. I liked the bottle in the window glass; the gentleman’s face peering out from under his hat as a halberd blade; and the lady transfixed by Cupid’s arrow in her breast.



Many of these figurals appear again in the Ditchley portrait of Elizabeth I: they seem to be a standard “old-timey” set. Nonetheless, I appreciated Queen’s face as a unicorn, and the reproduction on this one is gorgeous.





Essentially, Wentworth puzzles are like competent genre fiction, using a well-tried range of devices. They pass the time pleasantly, but don’t amaze.

Nautilus

I got one of theirs to try when I had Run Out of puzzles, just before Artifact unveiled the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club. I went for Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night—all the puzzlers carry that one.

On first impression, this maker is aspiring and a little anxious to impress. They assure the buyer that these are “heirloom” puzzles “for adults.” There’s a satin bag inside the box, like dress-up for a perfume bottle or an off-brand liqueur. And unlike savvier companies that give you at most a postcard- or even a postage-stamp-sized image to work from, or a cropped one (if there are fanciful borders to conceal), or none at all, Nautilus includes a 1:1 repo for a guide. They want to hold your hand.

I found the color just a bit over-saturated.

That said, the puzzle itself was really quite a pleasure to do, with a reasonably clever cut and pretty whimsies.



I would get another puzzle from Nautilus, if there’s an image I particularly like.

Artifact

Back to the quarter-inch, takes-an-earthquake-to-shake-it-to-bits construction.



They do some neat whimsies, but what they really like to play with are experimental cuts: synapses, watch gears, split tendrils, tessellations, clouds, stars...I love that they credit their designers.

Clearly these guys are geeks. They tend to chose the weirder classical artists, which is fine by me: Bosch, Bruegel, Archimboldo, Munch. They carry some stunning contemporary fantasy and surrealist art, but I do find a number of their images, well, twee. I’d love to see them do Remedios Varo, but I suspect they can’t afford the rights.

So far I’ve completed:

Two ingenious, more or less circular puzzles:

Stem Cell, of which I wrote: “deliciously like a disassembled watch, full of cogs. But it's a living watch, so there are hexes like molecules; there are curious organelles and a sort of nervous system.”



Circle of Time, with a fairy-tale image and divertingly witty whimsies: Einstein in profile and equation, that butterfly, Schrödinger's cat...





Two surrealist pictures by Sergey Tyukanov.

Flying Bottle has neat figurals—I like the suffragette.





Moon has rather minimalist whimsies. (If you’re going to do aeronautics, why no Icarus? no Da Vinci’s helicopter?) What I loved were the starry connectors in a bluegreen sky.



And most recently, The Garden of Earthly Delights.



Oooh! I’ve wanted this one as a puzzle since forever. I mean, people frolicking in eggshells and wearing owls and ripe fruit—what’s not to like? My one disappointment is that 11” x 25” (a generous size for a wooden puzzle) is simply too small to appreciate all of the details. You look at ants cavorting on creature-back, and long for a zoom lens.

This came with an entire Noah’s Ark of whimsies—and a bagpipe







So the puzzle-ground was a kind of prelapsarian heavens, with a Zodiac inset. Now we know that Eve was a Taurus, and Adam a Leo.

Peaceful

Another well-reviewed company I haven’t yet tried is Peaceful Puzzles, which is hopelessly back-ordered. I do like their taste in pictures—Dulle Griet!—



and they promise 1/4-inch maple plywood. I just wish I could get a better look at their whimsies and their cuts before I spend. If those are enticing, I am tempted to get their Hunters in the Snow. That’s one of the images I do over and over on my iMac (along with Allegory of Sight, which I now have from Liberty, O joy!), and Wentworth let me down. I could fall into that painting forever. Peaceful isn't offering their 16” x 24” cutting now.  l could order a smaller version now (and wait three or four months for it); or, if the pandemic is ever done with, spring for the 800-piecer.

I don’t expect I’ll ever try a Stave Puzzle, as their handcarved creations start at $977 for a hundred pieces, and go up into the stratosphere.

En route from the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club:






And my number’s come up again at Liberty. Ocean Life this time.




Nine