Énigmes Chinoises ("Chinese Puzzles").

Paris: Chez Grossin de l'Imprimerie de Didot le jeune,, 1817. The world's first puzzle craze First edition, extremely rare complete, of the first Tangram book to be published on the European continent. We have traced just two surviving complete sets, held at Princeton and in the Menil Collection, while the Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France seemingly has just the booklet. The Tangram puzzle was invented in China at the dawn of the 19th century, with the oldest surviving book on the subject published in 1813. Tangram sets and books quickly found their way to Europe via merchant ships, with the first Western book on the subject appearing in March 1817 (John and Edward Wallis's The Fashionable Chinese Puzzle). The present work, modelled on that of the Wallis duo, appeared shortly after on 19 July, with a spate of similar publications subsequently released in Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Western fashionable circles were hooked: "cartoonists of the day captured the craze by portraying men unwilling to go to bed with their wives, chefs unable to do the cooking and doctors refusing to attend patients because they were too busy rearranging triangles" (Bellos, p. 157). Although the clamour inevitably died down, the puzzle has remained a popular leisure pursuit for the last two centuries. Its 19th-century fans included Edgar Allen Poe, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Anderson, and Michael Faraday. Its continued status as the most popular of all rearrangement puzzles lies in a player's "ability to transform these simple, geometric pieces into charming, elegant, sophisticated and sometimes paradoxical figures" (Slocum). This publication is known in two variants, with the Princeton and Menil copies both employing turquoise paper for the boards and ivory for the pieces. Duodecimo, pp. 4. Booklet with engraved frontispiece and 2 plates. Original yellow boards. Together with 6 colour plates (130 x 170 mm) laid down on three folding yellow boards as issued, as well as recessed tray, yellow boards, with 7 original loose tangram tiles in 79 x 41 mm arrangement. All housed in yellow card slipcase decoratively printed in black. Booklet boards bright, spotting internally, folding plates and tray well-preserved with just light soiling, slipcase soiled and worn. A very good example of this unusual and delicate publication. Alex Bellos, Here's Looking at Euclid, 2010; Jerry Slocum, "Tangram: the World's First Puzzle Craze", available online.