Sometimes I’m puzzled
By Bill Duncan
The View From Here
I just read about a solution suggested by a medical researcher to the growing problem of stress among humans in these troubled times – working jigsaw puzzles.
The activity it was said has a calming effect on people because they can only find that odd piece of a tree among the forest of green if they concentrate only on the puzzle, not on their problems. Perhaps that is why I have always liked to work on jigsaw puzzles.
I even get a catalog that has puzzles in all shapes, sizes and complexity.Studying that catalog after reading the comment about puzzles as stress busters, I am sure some would cause stress, not relieve it.
In 2004, Anne D. Williams, a leading historian of the American jigsaw puzzle, wrote an interesting book: "Jigsaw Puzzle, Piecing Together a History" that traced jigsaw puzzles back to the 1760s when European map makers pasted maps on sheets of wood and then cut them with a jigsaw into small pieces. The theory, Williams said, was to teach children geography.
The first was produced by John Spilsbury, a London engraver and map maker.
Indeed, she said, jigsaw puzzles were a teaching tool for everything from nursery rhymes to picture stories. Apparently, adults discovered how much fun it was to put together a jigsaw puzzle and embraced it as a parlor game.
Williams said puzzles for adults emerged around 1900 in the United States. While some thought that working them as silly and childish, she said, the puzzle addict "ignored meals while pleading ‘just one more piece.’" She said the dedicated puzzler would continue working on the puzzle into the wee hours of the morning.
Personally, I like to set up a card table and spill out the puzzle pieces to be assembled. First, I fill in the edges and then work on the middle for weeks at a time, with several-day breaks.
Nowadays the puzzle box comes with a picture to aid the puzzler, but at first, according to Williams, there was no such guide for the puzzle worker. In fact that was part of the puzzle.
To me that would be stress on the puzzle doer – especially if I were the doer. Even with the picture staring me in the face, I can’t always determine what piece fits where and I might try a dozen pieces before I find the right interlocking one.
Williams said in 1909 jigsaw puzzles were so popular that Parker Brothers stopped making other games and devoted its entire factory to puzzle production. Actually, the Great Depression in 1929 caused a resurgence of puzzle popularity. She said puzzles were cheap entertainment during those dreary days. Sales reached 10 million per week, she said. The reason? Williams wrote that it gave the puzzler "an escape from the troubled times, as well as an opportunity to succeed in a modest way." It gave them a sense of accomplishment, "that was hard to come by when the employment rate was climbing above 25 percent."
Wooden puzzles dominated the market until the late 1800s when cardboard backing was first introduced. Oddly today there is a hobby of building the cardboard puzzle, then gluing the back of the finished puzzle to a plywood backing and framing the puzzle as a piece of art.
Me? I recycle the puzzles I complete by breaking them down and donating them to thrift stores. I seal the box with tape to insure all the pieces stay in the box until the new owner reassembles the puzzle. Of course when you buy a used puzzle, there is that likelihood that one of the pieces will be missing.
Now that is a true test of stress.