The English Jigsaw Puzzle, 1760-1890 : With a Descriptive Check-List of Puzzles in the Museums of Great Britain and the Author's Collection

Wayland (Publishers) Ltd, London, first edition, 1972. Cloth, pictorial endpapers, 4to,. 164 pp, 8 colour ills and 59 black-and-white ills. From the blurb: "The reader will discover that jigsaws were invented more than two hundred years ago by a London engraver and that they were designed, not as a toy, but as a serious teaching aid. Their history is traced from the 1760's to the 1890's when colour printing and greater mechanization began to destroy the charm and character of their first hundred years. The author traces the changing fashions in subjects, the evolving pattern of manufacture and distribution, and describes the reception given to 'dissections', as jigsaws were then called, by the educationalists of the day. References to them in literature are also quoted. Linda Hannas has visited thirty-five museums throughout Great Britain in which she found some 330 pre-1890 puzzles. These, together with about 260 in her own collection are individually described, located and arranged under subject headings in this book. Jigsaw publishers, engravers, etc. are listed with their products. Thus the reader can not only discover the origin and history of the jigsaw but can see at a glance the whereabouts of any particular puzzle." Contents: 1 Historical Background; 2 The Inventor: his Life and Background ; 3 Eighteenth-Century Dissections; 4 Nineteenth-Century Dissections; 5. Principal Publishers; 6 The Jigsaw Trade; 7 Dissections and the Educationalists; 8 Dissections in Literature; 9 Foreign Puzzles; 10 Related Puzzles; 11 Postscript; Checklist of Dissected Puzzles; Biographical Index; Bibliography; General Index. Boards slightly scuffed, otherwise Good.