Welcome back to my next column of MAPPING THE WORLD with Maria! 

The Older-than-Dust One

To find jigsaws from the 18^th century is a patience game itself. And mostly it ends up with paying a small fortune for a complete one (you could get a used car for it) or accept that not all pieces survived 250 years, but you have still money in your pocket. Lucky me, that I found such an ‘unperfect’ item a year ago. An antique wooden jigsaw made and sold by Robert Sayer in 1775.

Robert Sayer, himself one of the dominant print and mapmakers of the last half of the 18th century, was the publisher of this map. He began his business as a print seller in the 1740s. To expand his business, Robert's brother James, who had married the widow of publisher Philip Overton, transferred Overton's established stock to Robert.

At various times, Robert Sayer took over the stock of older publishers such as John Rocque (died 1762) or cartographers such as Thomas Jefferys (bankrupt in 1766, died 1771).

In the 1770s and 80s, he worked with several partners, including John Bennett and the aforementioned Laurie and Whittle.

Let us take a closer look at Sayers' advertising catalogue from 1775, in which he offers not only map prints, but also dissected maps:

Determining the age of this map was somewhat difficult. A similar map is held in the Library of Congress in the USA and dates from around 1775. Australia had not yet been fully discovered and still formed an island with Tasmania. The first voyage of James Cook (1768-1771) and the route of Samuel Wallis (1766-1768) in the late 1760s are marked on the map.

However, both tracks are missing on my puzzle. I therefore suspect that the map used for the dissection dates from around 1770.

With this information, I tried to find out whether Sayer had already offered dissections before 1775. An early catalogue from 1766 was available in certain libraries around the world, but not online.

So, I wrote to the British Library in the hope that someone on the staff could provide me with a scan of the one-page map section. And incredibly, the library sent me the scanned files after only a few days! You Brits are the best!

Result: there is no entry for map dissections offered in 1766. When Robert Sayer actually started selling puzzles is still unknown, but we're on the case!

After all this research, I want to improve the puzzle by completing it with replacement pieces. Since the puzzle auction took place in the UK, I had it sent to Pete, who organised mahogany boards and sent them to Howard Smeeton, who has already cut out all the missing pieces. I will show you the progress in a next blog in July! Stay tuned!