As a guide, my nose is not to be trusted

The capital of Lancashire is Lancaster. The Lancastrians and the Yorkists are like chalk and cheese.

At last, they came upon a signpost to York somewhere in the murky depths of Lancashire. The sign looked antique. Doubts growing, they followed it. It was the only sign to York they saw. And they're still unsure whether they saw York itself or not.

According to the index in my Gazetteer of Britain, there is a tiny village in Lancashire called York. But when I turn to the map in the same volume, it is not shown. I suspect it is almost invisibly small, this York. It's the kind of place depicted in an old cartoon where a driver of a sports car, conquering miles at lightning speed, says to his female passenger: "This is a pretty village, wasn't it?"

I have tried to replicate my brother-in-law's misleading Internet routemaking exercise. But if I punch in "York," only two places come up: The first is York, the big tourist town in Yorkshire. And the other is a place called ... New York.

New York? I wonder where that might be?

A "dissected map" doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs, perhaps. But if you were a mid-18th century child in an aristocratic or middle-class family, you'd take your fun where you could find it. There was still a tendency to think of the child as some kind of inadequate adult, the sooner educated into serious maturity the better. Education was a heavy business.

But there was a growing recognition, as the century progressed, that making education more amusing might not be a bad idea. Dissected maps, so-called, were among the first evidences of this changing attitude.

The invention and its name were the work of an English cartographer and engraver, John Spilsbury, in the early 1760s. His idea was probably inspired by a slightly earlier "board game," as we would call them today, produced in London in 1759. This was a map of Europe across which was printed a track. The players raced along the track after throwing a die. Its originator, John Jeffreys, called it "A Journey Through Europe or The Play of Geography."

Spilsbury's dissected maps were the first to use printed maps glued to mahogany and cut into sections so that a child had to assemble them. In the process he or she would learn the shape and location of various countries. (The one above is dated 1766.)

Without knowing that his invention, which seems to have been immediately popular, was later to be called a "jigsaw puzzle," Spilsbury is still credited with being the first to make and market jigsaw puzzles.

A number of them survive, even if (in common with very many more recent jigsaws) they have pieces missing.

It was to be more than a century before die-stamping made possible the intricate interlocking pieces we now identify with jigsaw puzzles. Spilsbury and his successors in the dissected-map business used to cut out their pieces along the lines of country or county boundaries.

For 20 years after Spilsbury, all such puzzles were geography lessons. And then, as collector Linda Hannas has observed, "quite suddenly the scene changed and the spirit of levity broke in." After that, jigsaws could be of all sorts of pictures, even if many still carried moralistic and pedagogical overtones.

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