Deep inside the piece process

In 1969, Richardson, with his family, abandoned New Jersey and a high-powered career as computer analyst for this small town two hours north of Boston. Less than a year after beginning a new computer job here, he was laid off, along with Dave Tibbetts, a graphic designer. Together they formed a game business.

They were making $3 cardboard puzzles when a wealthy puzzle aficionado offered them $300 to construct a high-end wooden number. Richardson drove down to meet him in Boston, took one look at the "fancy wooden puzzles" this man and his wife were so fond of, and agreed to give it a shot.

The puzzles had been made by Par Company, the premier maker of luxury puzzles for five decades before it shut down in the '70s. Richardson quickly realized "there was an existing customer base of rich and crazy people who wanted to buy puzzles." So in 1974, Steve and Dave merged their names to form "Stave," which they "serendipitously" discovered can also mean to break into pieces. (Mr. Tibbetts went his own way a few years later.)

Stave picked up where Par left off, using many of the same techniques - personalized silhouettes in the shape of a customer's initials or favorite animal. It also ushered in what Anne Williams, an economics professor at Bates College, describes in her book "The Jigsaw Puzzle" as "a renaissance of puzzles aimed at the luxury market."

The US has a long history with jigsaw puzzles. The first were made from images of maps split into pieces to help children learn geography. Later, before television, video games, and the Internet, they were a choice diversion, reaching peak popularity during the Great Depression.

Today, Richardson's workshop, with its nine scroll saws quietly buzzing away, employs 25 workers. He collaborates on original art with five outside artists. His wife, Martha, is the company's controller. She drives an Audi with vanity plates that read "JIGSAW." His say "PUZZLES."

Back in my office, without a picture, I had no idea what Richardson had sent me. It was only after browsing through a Stave catalog - Stave puzzles are primarily sold through their catalogs (802-295-5200) and online at stave.com - that I stumbled across "If the Shoe Fits." So, yes, by cheating, I got a sense of the puzzle's basic shape - a high-heeled button-up boot much like one of its individual pieces. I also saw it was a "Teaser," not one of Stave's most challenging "Tricks," but its difficulty was three on a scale of four.

So, with some pictorial guidance, I spread out the pieces on my desk at work. (This was work, after all.) The outline of the boot fit together more or less in the way traditional puzzles do. Colors and patterns and shapes corresponded to other nearby colors and patterns and shapes.

But the interior was something else. Dozens of shoe-shaped silhouettes jumbled together in the middle to form an unexpectedly coherent pattern. And there were all the Stave tricks: irregular edges, cutouts, and whammies.

Working intermittently over the next two days, I finished, with some help. I also managed to snap together the second, traditional puzzle during breaks.

It's hard to overstate the ingenuity of these puzzles, or the deep satisfaction I feel as I turn to look at them on my desk.

It's the contentment of "making order out of chaos," says Michael Fenswick, a puzzler from Nashville, Tenn. But the beauty isn't just surface - he and his wife also enjoy the smell of the wood.

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