TANGRAM.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Énigmes Chinoises ("Chinese Puzzles"). 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,

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