Puzzling at Work

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I work at the Helsinki University Library. A couple of years ago my boss at the time, who also enjoys puzzles (many, many librarians do) said I should bring a puzzle to work. So I did. More than one, in fact. There’s a round table in one of our break rooms, and most of the time, there’s a puzzle on it.

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A colleague working on a Heye cartoon puzzle (Wildlife by Mordillo).

Many colleagues started bringing in their own puzzles as well.

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Currently, we are working on a 1000 piece Educa puzzle showing part of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

Before last Christmas, I decided to put a puzzle out for the customers as well. Just for the holidays. Well, it turned out to be so popular we couldn’t possibly stop 🙂 And the customers started bringing in their own puzzles as well.

 

When a puzzle is finished, the customers can break it up and bring the box to the service desk, where they get a new puzzle in exchange. A 1000-piece puzzle seldom takes more than a day, and there is almost always someone working on the puzzle.

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Puzzle shelf behind the service desk.

The library has had a lot of positive feedback about the puzzles, with one customer saying that the puzzle makes the library seem like a friendly and welcoming place.

Ahoy!, 2007-12-23

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On this day 11 years ago…

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Ahoy! by RJ Crisp, Heye, 1500 pieces. Completed on December 23rd, 2007.

This puzzle will have been produced in 2007 or shortly before (say, 2005-2007), but there was an earlier version of the same image, released in 1991, with 1000 pieces:

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Image from the Jigsaw Wiki

The earlier version was called Nelson’s Crew, also published by Heye. I don’t know why it says Papillon on the box, but Fun Puzzle was definitely a Heye series. I found a few others with the Papillon-logo (here and here, for example), and they were all pre 1993. Since 1993 there is the Heye logo instead.

I think I got my first Heye cartoon puzzle in the late 90s, but they’ve been around for longer than that. I don’t think I ever had one from the Fun Puzzle series.

Zeche Zollverein, Essen, 2018-08-30

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On Friday, December 21st 2018, the last piece of coal was brought up from a mine in Germany. It is now officially over. Ever since the middle ages coal has been brought up from the ground in the Ruhr area, where Dortmund is located. In later times much of that coal was used in producing iron and steel, but since the late 70s heavy industry, as well as coal mining, has been winding down, causing a painful structural change in the area, with very high unemployment. In Dortmund, coal mining ended in 1987, and now the last mine in Bottrop is also closed.

The area has adapted and turned to other ways of making a living (in Dortmund, there are, for example, a lot of insurance companies, and many work in technology), but coal mining and heavy industry is still part of the cultural heritage. Some of the large headframes that still dominate the landscape have been turned into museums, as is the case with Zeche Zollverein in Essen, seen on this puzzle. Unfortunately, I don’t have a puzzle with a headframe from Dortmund. Or Bottrop 🙂

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Zeche Zollverein, Essen, Calvendo. Completed on August 30th, 2018.

I didn’t know the manufacturer, Calvendo, from before, but it turned out to be a good quality puzzle. As it indeed should be, at 30€ for 1000 pieces! I bought this from one of my usual online stores (https://www.puzzle-offensive.de/) and was happy to find a puzzle with a Ruhr-area theme, nothing from Dortmund though.

Recently I checked out the website of the manufacturer, and found that they have lots and lots of puzzles available, and several with Dortmund themes! It seems that you can sell posters, calendars and puzzles of your pictures on the site, and Calvendo prints them, cuts them and sends them out. The catalogue is enormous! I will definitely be ordering some of those Dortmund puzzles, but I’ll wait until summer when I’ll be in Germany for many weeks, because who knows how long these take to ship.

Also, if you want to publish with Calvendo, you should probably read this experience of a photographer who used Calvendo.

World Map 1611, 2010-01-15

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I started working on this Ravensburger 9000-piece puzzle in April 2009, and I finished in January 2010.

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The box contained the pieces in two bags of 4500 pieces each. I didn’t mix them together, obviously 🙂
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Early days. The border was quite difficult.

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Halfway there in August 2009.
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And finished in January 2010.
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Along the way, I managed to lose no less than four pieces.
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Europe.

Moomin Cartoon, 2018-12-19

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[Moomin cartoon], Peliko, 500 pieces. Completed on December 19th, 2018.
The Moomins first appeared in much-loved cartoons and books by Tove Jansson (1914-2001) There are also many adaptations for television, including a Japanese-Dutch-Finnish co-production from the early 90s that made the Moomins popular in many countries. The Japanese have always been especially fond of the Moomins, and Japanese tourists tend to leave Finland with plenty of Moomin stuff. There’s even a Moomin shop at the Helsinki airport.

Tove Jansson was a great lady. I remember seeing an interview with her when she was already quite old, and the reporter asked something slightly patronizing about wrinkles. She pulled herself up in mock outrage and said “Wrinkles? Wrinkles? I only have one wrinkle and I’m sitting on it!”. She was a national treasure. (I seem to be promoting a lot of Finnish artists – it certainly wasn’t my intention when I started the blog 🙂

Anyway, back to the puzzle. Like the previous Peliko puzzles, this is also of quite poor quality, with thin pieces. Again, the image prevents pieces fitting where they don’t belong being a problem.

Some images appeared multiple times.

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Here you can see how the pieces don’t always align perfectly.

I like their images enough to keep doing these puzzles anyway 🙂

 

Modern Rome, 2008-03-21

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This puzzle shows a painting by Giovanni Paolo Panini from 1757. It is a picture gallery with paintings showing Rome. In English, the painting is known as Picture Gallery with Views of Modern Rome, or Modern Rome for short. There are three different versions of the painting. In the version pictured on Wikipedia the Fontana di Trevi, for example, is on the left side, whereas on this version it’s the painting in the lower right-hand corner.

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Vedute di Roma Moderna, Ravensburger, 5000 pieces. Completed on March 23rd, 2008.

I really liked the idea of paintings within the painting, sort of like doing many smaller puzzles, although the pictures were similar enough in colouring that it was impossible to pick out the pieces for one particular picture. I remember pulling all the pieces with sky and all the pieces with vegetation and so on. First I did the red and blue cloth in the foreground. It was a really difficult puzzle, so difficult, in fact, that I started it twice.

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I eventually put it back in the box, and got it back out after Christmas, on December 27th 2007. Took me almost three months to finish, not counting the first attempt.

Clementoni’s Ethnic Collection

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About 10 years ago, Clementoni had a series called Ethnic Collection. The images always looked like they were painted on wood, and they represented various cultures seen as exotic from a European perspective. I had two puzzles from the series:

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Li Jiang River,  Clementoni, 1000 pieces. Completed on November 5th, 2007.
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Chichenitzái, Clementoni, 1000 pieces. Completed on February 23rd, 2009.

In addition, there were at least a couple of puzzles with African themes (one was Kilimanjaro) and one with an Indian theme (Taj Mahal, obviously).

The Largest One So Far

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The largest puzzle I’ve ever completed was The Garden of Earthly Delights, a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, 10 000 pieces. It was produced by Educa in 1997, and it was, at the time, the world’s largest puzzle, at least according to the box. According to Rare Puzzles, there is a 9000-piece version available, but the 10 000-piece one is very rare. I still have mine, and I’m not selling 🙂

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The puzzle came in a wooden box.

I bought the puzzle in the late 90s, but it took me more than 10 years to work up the courage to actually assemble it. The pieces were in 5 bags of 2000 each. I didn’t mix the bags and essentially completed five 2000-piece puzzles. I started on November 29th, 2011, and finished on January 12th, 2012. Once I got started, I was amazed at how fast it went.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures of the different stages, just the completed puzzle:

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I have every intention of assembling this again one day – and then it will be much more difficult. I did not take it apart in sections, so next time it really will be one 10 000-piece puzzle instead of five 2000-piece ones…

Humphrey Bogart, 2018-09-13

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For the next week or so I’m not expecting to get much puzzling done. I’m doing other fun things though, going to soccer games, visiting friends, singing Christmas carols in the stadium with 50 000 other fans, and baking cakes 🙂 I still have pictures of puzzles I’ve completed earlier, though, and I’ll be putting up some of those.

I got this one from a friend who did not enjoy it at all. She was like “Take this puzzle, I never want to see it again”. I quite enjoyed it 🙂 The face was the most difficult part, everwhere else there were plenty of clues, like text or the shade of the background colour changing.

I used to dislike doing close-ups of faces, but I seem to have gotten over that.

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