Aries

That wizard of design at Liberty has outdone himself with their 2021 spring list.

I’ve had my eye on the “Story Map of France” since it previewed in February: a pleasant picture, as full of whimsies as a Christmas pudding is of plums.





That mermaid! That sea serpent! Jeanne d’Arc! The Three Musketeers! Napoleon! And is that Jean-Jacques Rousseau seated on an invisible green bank?



Then came “Hawaiian Islands”—not as pretty a picture, to my mind, but the cut is a tour de force. There’s barely an inch that isn’t whimsical.








And just yesterday they unveiled “Leopard.” Not quite fallen for the picture: I love the celestial aspect; pity about the pink.




But O my! Just look at this cut! Those “zippers” tell me it transforms (like “The Hunt”)



—and certainly, the two halves of that glorious sun must somehow reunite. I adore the planets and the mazes, and I'm deeply curious about the metamorphosis.




My number should come up any day now. The queue is dwindled now to 27 business days (down from 58 or 59). I suppose I could chose one and then another? Which leaves my whole longstanding wishlist still ungotten.

Chris Wirth, their founder, gave a Zoom talk on “The History and Theory of the Jigsaw Puzzle,” under the auspices of (heaven help us) the San Diego Mensa. He was inspired by a fabulous inheritance from his great-aunts of 35 Falls Puzzles, handcut in the 1930s by Mary Belle Jones of Chagrin Falls, Ohio. (Her husband rubber-stamped the figure pieces; their children made and unmade the puzzles as quality control.) The Windsors discovered them andtook them up (which I don’t hold against the artisans), and made them a craze,

Wirth said that Liberty unthinkingly left their online shop open the first weekend of the lockdown, and came back on Monday to find the great pandemic puzzle rush in full flood, with a 30,000-puzzle order backlog. Their factory can turn out 500 a day. They had to halt ordering from March until May, which is when I came in.

They would love to get back to giving factory tours: they used to save the whimsies from flawed puzzles to give out to children. Aww.

It sounds as if they have just the one genius puzzle designer. May the heavens keep him well.

And meanwhile, Artifact’s stock has burgeoned, with lovely offerings, new and revived. A year ago, they had just three or four in stock.

This Odilon Redon was the last one I completed.




Isn't this cut pretty!




I love how the fierce little warrior is held in the moon-curve of the vase, and how one black flower is a crow.

Nine