TANGRAM.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Al gioco cinese chiamato il rompicapo. Appendice di figure First edition of this uncommon and early work on Chinese tangrams, the Florentine issue. There was also an issue published in Milan the same year by Pietro and Giuseppe Vallardi (no priority established, though the Milanese issue appears to have had hand-coloured plates rather than sepia).Both issues are scarce in commerce and institutions, with the Milanese issue surfacing slightly less regularly. WorldCat and Library Hub locate five copies of the Florentine issue (four in the US - Harvard, Cleveland Public Library, Princeton, University of Utah - and one in Australia - University of Sydney). Just Yale houses a copy of the Milanese. At auction, Florentine copies have appeared three times (Dominic Winter 2018, Bolaffi 2014, Bloomsbury 2007) and one Milanese is recorded (Christie's 2016, the Giancarlo Beltrame copy).Psychologist Jiannong Shi has called the tangram, a Chinese tile puzzle thought to have been developed in the Song Dynasty, "the earliest psychological test in the world" (p. 330). Tangrams arrived in Europe from 1817 onward and quickly became a popular craze; tangram sets became increasingly elegant and expensive, the pieces (or "tans") made from ivory, tortoiseshell, or mother of pearl, and elaborately carved. A number of accompanying books were published. John and Edward Wallis's The Fashionable Chinese Puzzle and its companion solution book, Key (both 1817), were among the earliest and most successful;

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.