The Jigsaw Puzzles Worth Their Weight in Gold?

Pictured above is the artwork used for a puzzle titled “Holidays In New York.” The scene shows Rockefeller Center in Manhattan blanked it snow. In the center is the world-famous Christmas tree overlooking the ice skating rink. It’s an iconic representation of the holidays, and — as both a puzzle and a tourist destination — would probably make for a pretty fun activity.

If you wanted to go the tourist route, the experience would probably cost you a good amount of money, unless you live locally. A plane ticket to New York City would run you, say, $500; one night in a hotel would probably be roughly the same. Figure another few hundred for food, cabs, shopping, and incidentals — that’s a $1,500 two-day trip. And that has to be cheaper than the puzzle, right?

Well, yes — but that assumes you’re only interested in the 100-piece version. As of this writing, that will cost you only (“only”) $895. Want a 250-piece challenge? You’re looking at a price tag of $2,895. The 1,000-piece version? Five bucks shy of $10,000.

And yes, people buy these.

The company behind these expensive pieces of pieces is Stave Puzzles, located in the small town of Norwich, Vermont. (Here’s a map.) Stave was founded in 1974 by Steve Richardson and Dave Tibbetts (Steve plus Dave yields “Stave”), two puzzle enthusiasts who wanted to create, in their words, “the Rolls-Royce of Puzzles.” The puzzles are made of wood each one, as the Boston Globe reported, “is meticulously hand-cut, one piece at a time, by a blade no wider than an eyelash. The pieces are then sanded, polished to shine, and placed inside a thick signature blue-and-green golden-embossed box.” The box doesn’t have a picture of the finished product — part of the joy, if you received the puzzle as a gift, is discovering what you’re building as you build it.

But maybe “joy” isn’t the right word. Richardson — who bought out Tibbetts early in the company’s history — doesn’t want his puzzles to be easy (which, given the price point, makes sense!). He calls himself the company’s “Chief Tormentor,” and it’s a title that is well-deserved. He developed a puzzle genre he calls “Tricks” which the company’s website describes as “a diabolically difficult genre in which some pieces will fit in more than one place,” and therefore, “will have multiple ways of fitting together – but only one correct solution.” One such puzzle, Olivia the Octopus, has perhaps as many as 10,000 “wrong” solutions, which helps explain its $2,695 price tag. But at least it has a correct solution — at least one of Stave’s puzzles didn’t even that. According to The Fader, “For an April Fools’ stunt in 1989, Richardson released a bagel-shaped puzzle, which, though it was made up of just five basic-looking pieces, was secretly designed to be unsolvable. People got so upset that he took it off the market and issued refunds.”

In general, though, customers of Stave are fans of their products and don’t seem to mind the price point. In 2011, according to CNN Money, they “announc[ed] a limited edition, a $4,000 puzzle called Atlantis” and, by the end of the month, received eight pre-orders. And according to an interview with Lancaster Farming, Stave has “a lot of customers who spend $10,000 to $20,000 yearly to test their wits, ingenuity, and patience,” and includes among their clientele “many well-known American families including the DuPonts, Rockefellers, Gateses, Bushes and Mellons.”

And while most of us don’t hail from one of those families, there’s a more accessible option — you can rent a Stave puzzle. It’s still pretty expensive — a one-time, six-week rental will cost you only (again, “only”?) $395.

Bonus fact: For most of us, doing puzzles is a hobby. But for Vancouver-based artist Tim Klein, it’s work. But that’s because he does them a little differently than everyone else. As he explains on his website, “a jigsaw puzzle manufacturer typically uses the same die-cut pattern for many different puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable” between the manufacturer’s puzzles. If you buy multiple sets, you can create weird combinations of surreal images — like mixing a horse and a train, or Tutankhamun and a Mack truck. You can check out his montages on his website, and some are for sale — for about $2,000. (He’s giving Stave a run for his — and his benefactors’! — money.)

From the Archives: Cross Words: It’s not about a jigsaw puzzle, but about a crossword puzzle. That counts, right?