Royersford library to host puzzle competition

January is National Puzzle Month, and the folks at Royersford Free Public Library are celebrating by hosting their first-ever jigsaw puzzle competition on Saturday.

As planned, teams of at least two people will complete identical 300-piece puzzles as quickly as possible. The RFPL librarians haven’t set age restrictions, but they figure the showdown’s target audience is eight-and-up. The clock starts at 10:30 a.m. in the community room at nearby Royersford Baptist Church, 452 S. Lewis Road.

“January is a great time for puzzles,” says Children’s and Teen Program Coordinator Pam Hagler. “It’s a cold month when people are looking for something to do indoors. I got the idea for the competition from other librarians who’ve done them. The Ravensburger puzzle company has a great program that lets you apply for free puzzles, and they gave us 15 for the competition. Some of the other local libraries are doing competitions in the upcoming months, so we’re going to trade our puzzles around to keep the idea going.”

RFPL patrons have already made its established jigsaw puzzle exchange a popular library option.

“The exchange started post-COVID when it seemed that a lot of people had gotten puzzles during the pandemic, so there was a glut of them that people donated,” Hagler says. “They’re still donating them, so that’s been great. We also have puzzles sitting out in the library all the time … for kids and adults, and people seem to have fun putting them together.”

Of course, puzzles come in numerous forms — everything from Sudoku to Rubik’s Cubes and the many brain-teasers in between — and proponents believe solving them also improves mindfulness as well as skills related to visual observation and problem-solving. Historians trace recreational puzzling as far back as ancient China and Greece … jigsaw puzzles, to the 18th century when they typically consisted of images painted on wood, then cut into pieces by jigsaw.

Eventually, London cartographer John Spilsbury began fragmenting or “dissecting” world maps for sale as educational tools. Ergo, the term “dissectologist” for jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts like members of the Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists. The organization was founded in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s but now has members around the world. Credit for National Puzzle Day in the U.S. goes to Jodi Jill, a prolific professional puzzler. Jill declared her birthday, Jan. 29, National Puzzle Day in the mid-1990s, and the observance evolved into National Puzzle Month.

That said, jigsaw puzzles — available in countless visual variations — make for a popular pastime year-round. In fact, marketing pros estimate some 1.8 billion jigsaw puzzles are sold in this country annually, and the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association, established in 2020, is “dedicated to creating a nationwide community for jigsaw puzzlers, establishing a framework for competitive jigsaw puzzling events and acting as the U.S. representative and official liaison with the World Jigsaw Puzzle Federation.

Among those competitive events:  This year’s annual USA Jigsaw Nationals,  scheduled for April 4-6 as part of Awesome Con, Washington D.C.’s comic con, and the World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, set for Sept. 15-21 in Valladolid, Spain.

Additional information about RFPL’s Jan. 25 puzzle competition:  610-948-7277.