The wooden boxes for the puzzles were made from mahogany or cedar, and the puzzles themselves backed with thin mahogany board.” Spilsbury jigsaw, “Europe divided into its kingdoms,” 1766 via Wikimedia Commons Shefrin describes early puzzles and other table games as “often beautiful pieces of craftsmanship-engraved, hand-colored, carefully mounted, folded, cut or otherwise assembled-and very expensive. Maps were thought to inculcate nationalism in the populace. Relevant to this connection between puzzles and geography, writes the librarian Jennifer Burek Pierce, is the way these objects dovetailed with the imperialist agenda of eighteenth-century England and its conquest of non-western territories. The earliest English table games were geographical, and the publishers were often map engravers and sellers. The “Dissected Map”Īs the librarian and historian Jill Shefrin notes, puzzles, or “dissected maps,” were invented in Georgian-era England, probably by a mapmaker named John Spilsbury in the early 1760s. But first, let’s go back to the puzzle’s origins. The last time interest in puzzles spiked so quickly? The Great Depression, an era with many parallels to the present. Perhaps not surprisingly, the use of puzzles as a way to escape from large-scale societal problems has historical precedents.
