Uncle John's Great Big Bathroom Reader by Bathroom Readers’ Institute Page A

recognize—stars, ducks, dogs, flowers, snowflakes, etc.).
    THE GOLDEN AGE OF PUZZLES
    When the craze died down, jigsaw puzzles had become a part of American life. By the 1920s, they were so cheap that just about anyone could afford them...manufacturers were using softer woods, which were easier to saw, and fancy engraving had been replaced by black and white lithographs that kids could paint with stencils and watercolors. By 1930, wood and jigsaws had given way to cardboard and die-cutting, so it was possible to buy a beautiful puzzle for as little as 10¢.
    As America got deeper into the Great Depression, these inexpensive puzzles became increasingly attractive family entertainment. The result: people went on another puzzle-buying binge. For about six months in the early 1930s, the U.S. could not get enough puzzles. At the peak of the fad, Americans were purchasing 6 million puzzles a week. Things got so frantic that newsstands began offering a service called “puzzle-a-week,” with new puzzles hitting the shelves every Wednesday. In less than a year, manufacturers sold more than $100 million worth of jigsaw puzzles (in 1930s money!).
    STAND-UP GUY
    Puzzles remained more or less unchanged after the 1930s. The artwork improved and special “luxury” puzzle makers sprang up to handcraft custom puzzles for movie stars and captains of industry, but they were really just more of the same thing. By the 1980s, puzzles had become a stale staple of the toy industry.
     
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    There are no turkeys in Turkey.
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    Then in 1989, a Canadian broadcasting executive named Paul Gallant decided to start a toy company. But he wasn’t sure what kind of toys he wanted to make. “I started thinking about puzzles, and howthey hadn’t changed much since the 1700s,” he told the New York Times in 1997, “and wondered why no one had ever made a three-dimensional puzzle.” He experimented with ordinary cardboard puzzle pieces, but they fell over when he tried to stand them up. So he made some out of the same kind of polyethylene foam that is used to insulate airliner cockpits. The pieces were sturdy enough to build miniature walls.
    Gallant made a 3-D puzzle resembling a Victorian mansion and took it to the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store in Manhattan, where he showed it to the store’s toy and game buyer. “I took the puzzle and I threw it in the air,” Gallant says. It didn’t break. “I said, ‘No glue, no pins, no nothing, it just stays like this interlocking.’ And I pushed the wall off and I separated the pieces and showed him this was really a puzzle. And he said, ‘Wow, where did you get that?’” F.A.O. Schwartz bought 74 puzzles that afternoon in 1991; Gallant’s company now sells more than $100 million worth of 3-D puzzles—shaped like skyscrapers, castles, the Eiffel Tower, the Titanic, and even Star Wars spaceships—every year, making it another of the biggest puzzle fads in history.
    PUZZLING INNOVATIONS
    Has it been a while since you’ve bought a puzzle? Here are some new products you might find on your next trip to the toy store:
    • Mono-colored Puzzles. No pretty pictures, just puzzle pieces, hundreds of them, all painted the same color so that there are no clues as to where they belong in the puzzle.
    • Multiple-border Puzzles. Pieces with straight edges that appear to be border pieces, but actually are inner pieces.
    • Impossibles. 750-piece borderless puzzles with too many pieces. No taking the easy way out by connecting outer edges first, because edge pieces look like inner pieces. To make it even more puzzling: five extra pieces that don’t fit anywhere in the puzzle.
    • Triazzles. All of the pieces are triangle shaped with similar designs, but with only one correct solution.
    • The World’s Most Difficult Jigsaw Puzzles. Double-sided puzzles with 529 pieces. The same artwork is on both sides, rotated 90 degrees with respect to each other.
     
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    First female boxing match in the U.S.: March