Jigbooks

I reviewed some properties of jigsaws on 1st November and now notice a book about same, a book which, I might say, takes no interest whatsoever in the formal properties of these fascinating puzzles.

So far, my second book about jigsaws, the first being the memoir by Margaret Drabble, noticed in the other place on June 14th amongst other dates. A quite different sort of book this one, a book written with all the love and care of someone - Tom Tyler - who has spent a good part of his adult life in and around jigsaws, rather than that of someone, albeit a gifted amateur, who has come rather late to the craft.

The first interesting point about this book is that its purchase, from Amazon, was the first occasion on which I noticed that the Amazon price was not the best price on the street. On this occasion, we learned from a leaflet accompanying the Saturday DT that an outfit called Postcript would have supplied the book for something like half the price that Amazon required. To be fair, Postscript (http://www.psbooks.co.uk/) do seem to rather specialise in this sort of coffee table book for the discerning buyer. The sort of books which one suspects were made to be remaindered, with some obscure shop in some obscure town serving to offer them at what is described at the proper price and from which very few purchases are ever made. It would not even need to be open very often or for very long to comply with the laws of the land concerning sale price labeling.

But the main point is that the book has done what I wanted. I have learned something of the history of jigsaws, something of their manufacture and something of the worlds of jigsawyers and jigsaw collectors. A regular cornucopia of jigfacts.

I have, for example, been conditioned by having restricted myself, in large part, to machine pressed jigsaws, with the way in which the cutting dies are made (by hand) accounting for much of the regularity that I was talking about on the 1st. Saw cut jigsaws are much freer in their composition, also rather prone to the inclusion of whimsies which I find a little irritating. I like the regularity of the machine pressed puzzles. On the other hand, it would be interesting to see how hard I would find it to switch to the hand cuts. Would the whole pace & nature of the game change? Would one enjoy the various traps and pratfalls which the enterprising hand cutter had worked into your puzzle, traps and pratfalls which make cunning and subtle use of the subject image? Certainly, some of those illustrated in this book look as if they would be very difficult to solve. It would not do to be in a hurry or to be competitive.

Then I think that it would be fun to visit a jigsaw factory. But maybe that would take a bit of organizing. Maybe it would be easier to visit a jigsaw museum. So I ask Mr. Google about jigsaw museums to find that there are plenty of museums offering online jigsaws of their exhibits (see, for example http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk. Clearly my notion of using jigsaws as an art educational aid is not very original at all) but none where the jigsaws are the exhibits. One would have thought that there would be such a thing somewhere. The sort of thing you might come across in Brading (on the Isle of Wight), or Yarmouth or Blackpool. I shall try to remember to keep looking.

The book goes on to explain that there is now a computer controlled contraption which enables one to cut a wooden jigsaw using high pressure water jets - the same sort of thing I presume which dental hygienists like to attack one's mouth with. Hopefully this will mean that one will be able to commission a jigsaw of more or less any image one likes, of more or less any degree of difficulty - without the expense of a hand cut. If one had a companion machine that could apply a digital image in a suitable way to a sheet of plywood one would be away. And I would hope that such a companion machine would be available, art shops having been able to transfer images to hardboard - thus avoiding the need for the glass which reflects - for thirty years or more. It may even be that the imaged boards that they produce are already of jigsaw quality, that is to say that the image will stand up to and survive the cutting process.

In the meanwhile, there are plenty of people out there who make their living cutting puzzles to order. So I shall spend a happy breakfast hour dreaming about the image that I shall have turned into a puzzle for some upcoming birthday. Shall I go for a photograph or a painting? Shall it be a landscape? Shall I tour the National Gallery to select a suitable image? In the case where the artist has fussed about the frame - Holman Hunt, for example, was apt to - would it be appropriate to include the frame in the image?

And so one might go on.