This is Bill’s Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles, an archive of my FREE newsletters about wooden jigsaw puzzles, old and new.
My newsletters collectively document my continuing challenges from assembling wooden jigsaw puzzles of varying styles, both from the past and present generations of makers and designers. The series will also occasionally include beginners’ guides to wooden jigsaw puzzles, essays about their history and continuing evolution, and the relationship of this older and more sophisticated sibling to the more-familiar cardboard jigsaw puzzles.
I hope that the my occasional newsletters, and collectively this archive, proves useful for both people who are new to this hobby and to experienced wood puzzlers.
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The newsletters will primarily be puzzle review picture essays that document my experience in assembling specific wooden jigsaws, and the things that I learned from my research about them. These postings may introduce you to companies and brands, old and new, about which you were not previously familiar.
They may also help you to identify what types of puzzles and styles of cutting best suit your own interests and abilities, give ideas for different styles of puzzles that you might like to try, and maybe even give you a whole new way of looking at this puzzling hobby.
Along the way I will also post introductory essays about the history of jigsaw puzzles, information about online and other resources that puzzling enthusiasts might find useful, and observations about my own strategies and approaches to buying and assembling puzzles.
As a subscriber you can be part of an extended community of people who share your interest in wooden jigsaw puzzles. You can comment about my postings, or about other peoples’ comments. I will use your feedback to correct errors or omissions or to add new relevant information to the blog entry. Over time, this blog archive is intended to become a useful source of readily-available online information about wooden jigsaw puzzles.
About me
I am not an wooden jigsaw puzzle expert. I began this hobby only about five months before I began this newsletter/blog series. At that point I had completed only 21 wooden puzzles so far.
Besides the fun that I have had assembling my puzzles, I find enjoyment in the process of researching to decide what puzzles I should buy (since they are sufficiently expensive as to require careful decision-making.) I also do research during and after assembly to learn more about both the puzzle and its image. What is the story behind the company, or the specific designer or cutter who made this puzzle? Who is the artist, and is there a story behind the painting? How does this particular puzzle fit into the continuing evolution of this toy for adults?
You get the idea: Besides doing puzzles I enjoy researching things. Perhaps it comes from my natural curiosity. Or maybe it is just a habit that I developed during forty years of employment a government researcher and policy analyst. Either way, for me a puzzle isn’t really completed just because the last piece has been put in, but after I’ve done some further research and then shared what I have discovered with others here.
While looking for sources of information I discovered a Facebook group called the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzles Club. That has been both a great source of information and community, and although I am not really a social media sort of person I soon found myself moving from being a lurker to an active participant. That included sharing this type of puzzle reviews/essays with the group.
However, I found that Facebook is more suitable for sharing brief, current observations, or for seeking input from others, and not for this sort of deep-dive photo-essay reviews. I learned from another of my somewhat specialized hobbies –being an amateur historian, folklorist and collector of Christmas and other Midwinter music – that blogs can leave a more useful and permanent legacy in the searchable world of the internet.
The year before I began this newsletter/blog, with a lot of assistance from my tech-savvy daughter Wendy) I had transitioned from sharing my discoveries in that field with friends and family via an annual compilation CD with liner notes into my newsletter/blog Bill’s Midwinter Music. That experience gave me the ability to create Bill’s Wooden Jigsaw puzzles.
Ground rules
I am not affiliated with any puzzle company or maker, but I am willing to accept puzzles from makers for review. If I do receive such a puzzle or any other benefits from a company or maker that are not available to other customers I will acknowledge that in the review, and also do my best not to allow that to affect my assessment of the puzzle.
This is a hobby for me and I intend it to stay that way! This newsletter/blog will not evolve into a service that you have to pay for, and this is not a site that is created for selling the puzzles that I review. Also, I will never sell or use my list of subscribers for any purpose other than distribution of these newsletters.
The newsletters include reviews of puzzles that are still in print and available from their makers. My intention is to minimize divulging pictures or information in my reviews about features in such puzzles that could detract from the tricks or charming elements (such as multi-piece whimsies) that the puzzle designer intended to be a surprise. I will take some guidance on this from how much information the makers include on their own websites.
As of September 2022, reviews of puzzles that are still in production will have a spoiler warning after the review, and the walk-through of my assembly will be after the spoiler warning. In that part of my essays I do want to share with you what aspects of the puzzle fascinated, perplexed, or downright confounded me.
As a general rule, if I do show information about the tricks and delights of puzzles that are still in production they would be in the assembly walkthrough portion of the posting, after the Spoiler Alert. However, above the spoiler warning I will include information about the general cutting design, and it may include samples of some techniques when needed to explain the findings in my review. But a picture of the back of a currently-available puzzle, for example, would always be after a spoiler warning.
This self-imposed restriction is relaxed for puzzles that are no longer offered by their makers, and especially for vintage puzzles where the maker is no longer in business. You are unlikely to assemble such puzzles yourself unless you actively seek them out. If you do happen to have an opportunity to obtain such a puzzle that I have reviewed, hopefully you will remember my general impression of its quality and suitability for you, but will have forgotten the specific spoilers in my review/essay.
I will undoubtedly be developing more such self-imposed rules and will update this About Page as as this series progresses.
Puzzle reviewing in general - considerations and standards
After about six months of writing these postings it seems to me that there are three major factors that shape how much I personally enjoy assembling a particular puzzle:
The intrinsic qualities of the puzzle itself;
Whether I am in the right mood at the time to assemble a puzzle with its image, and;
Whether I am in the right mood for the degree and kind of challenge that its cutting presents.
It is possible, even likely, that the two mood factors are the most important factors in how I respond to a puzzle but they are both very subjective and very personal. They should not influence what I say in my review-essays. A review should be about the puzzles, not about me. (But I have to admit that I sure do incorporate a heck of a lot of ME in my rambling, quirky writing style!) But while I am reviewing I try to acknowledge and distinguish between those factors and my comments about the intrinsic qualities of the puzzles.
Some of the qualities of puzzles themselves are much more amenable to objectivity in analysis. My long career in analyzing government policies (see my background above in About Me) seems to have made me inclined to analyze things. That is probably why I am drawn towards studying puzzles and not just assembling them, as well as why I tend to go into technical detail in these reviews.
It seems to me that there are also three major categories of intrinsic characteristics of a puzzle that effect how much a person would enjoy it:
The image’s artistic quality and how well it and its style matches that person’s personal artistic tastes (Extremely subjective but probably the most important factor);
The style, quality and creativity of its cutting design (Still subjective but very important for my own enjoyment); and
Technical aspects of the puzzle’s fabrication and condition.
We have the ability to self-select for these first two factors when we choose which puzzles to buy or borrow. Puzzle-makers are well aware that it is the artwork that sells puzzles. They almost always show us the image and their style of whimsies (if any) in their online catalogs. They want you to be successful in picking a puzzle with artwork that you will like so that you will come back to buy more puzzles from them.
Separate from showing off their whimsies they are somewhat more mixed in the extent to which they show off other aspects of their cutting designs. Some show the full cutting pattern, some give limited information, and some seem to want the puzzle aspects of their puzzles to be something for you to discover for yourself during assembly. Some self-rate their puzzles for difficulty, and some don’t.
I can understand a rationale for any of these choices. I personally prefer to see the cutting pattern before I buy, and am slower to buy if I can’t do a self-selection for that factor. My own self-selection also explains my frequent references to the Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club on Facebook. People who post messages there often share pictures and information that is not on the maker’s website (often with spoiler alerts) about cutting designs.
Many if not most of the puzzles that I buy are based upon recommendations from people in that group. My care in self-selection explains why I end up posting so many positive reviews of puzzles. In fact, in this whole series I have yet to give a puzzle what I think of as a bad review. That because I have really enjoyed assembling every wooden puzzle I have attempted (except for Salmon’s Academy vintage puzzle Perfect Harmony, and in my review of that one I did not attribute the problem to the puzzle itself but to me not having been in the right mood for it at the time.)
Besides analyzing the factors that are subject to objective assessment I also have been looking for patterns in which styles of cutting designs most appeal to my own personal preferences. I want to recognize the cutting styles I like best to help me make my own future purchases. And after I have developed insights about that I can’t help but to share them with you. Sometimes I do that in the reviews and other times that sort of content is in my puzzle walkthroughs after a Spoiler Alert.
You may have noticed that I try to include only limited photographs of cutting patterns in my reviews, but I provide much more complete information near the after the Alert. That separation is to enable you to do your own self-selection for this factor if you want. I know that not everyone has my amazing puzzling superpower of forgetfulness, and for many people having too much information in advance about the cutting design might spoil the puzzle.
Technical aspects are the oddball factor in this latter list of characteristics that are intrinsic to puzzles. In general, although I can imagine there could be such excellence in the making of a puzzle that one is blown-away by its sheer quality (many people describe the ultra-expensive Stave puzzles that way) most of the time it is shortcomings from the expected quality that draws my attention and comments.
I tend to dwell on the technical fabrication because of a genetic predisposition for that sort of thing. My grandfather grew up on the farm but became a machinist, inventor, and he started a manufacturing company. My father became responsible for the design and manufacturing side of that company when he got out of the Army after WWII and became the president of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers even though he had no formal engineering education.
I wasn’t interested in design and fabrication at the time and didn’t go into the family business and follow in my father and grandfather’s footsteps. But now in my old age that interest is popping out in the form of critiquing puzzle-making (and, I like to think, doing a pretty good job of it) all while having limited experience or education in anything related to the topic. I suppose that’s what they call irony.
Most makers (but not Hidden Piece) call their wooden jigsaw puzzles “heirloom quality” somewhere on their websites, and I suppose that all of them can be considered that if they are compared to their cardboard counterparts. For these postings my subjective distinction is that I consider puzzles to be “premium” ones if they have both technical specifications and a price-point that separates them from the lower-cost “standard” category of wooden puzzles.
Makers of premium puzzles are competing against each other based more on quality than price, while makers of standard puzzles are making puzzles for a more price-sensitive marketplace. Because of their higher prices, the default expectation for premium puzzles is flawlessness. Standard puzzles need to be cut more slack.
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