Thoreau and jigsaws

Lately I’ve been reading two books I plan to review: Margaret Drabble’s memoir The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws and the new edition of Thoreau’s Journal from New York Review Books.

It was interesting to discover an odd connection between the two. In a passage included in the NYRB edition, Thoreau not only compares the disassembled shell of a painted turtle to a jigsaw puzzle, he actually anticipates (a key word in the Journal) the three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle.

Oct. 18, 1855
I find the white fragments of a tortoise-shell in the meadow, — thirty or forty pieces, straight-sided polygons, — which apparently a hay-cart passed over. They look like broken crockery. I brought it home and amused myself with putting it together. It is a painted tortoise. The variously formed sections or component parts of the shell are not broken, but only separated. To restore them to their place is like the game which children play with pieces of wood completing a picture. It is surprising to observe how these different parts are knitted together by countless minute teeth on their edges....

To rebuild the tortoise-shell is a far finer game than any geographical or other puzzle, for the pieces do not merely make part of a plane surface, but you have got to build a roof and a floor and the connecting walls. These are not only thus dovetailed and braced and knitted and bound together, but also held together by the skin and muscles within. It is a band-box.