A 99-piece mini puzzle of Paris after dark, in a box small enough for a coat pocket.
The city of light — which is not what you think
The nickname predates electricity by a very long way, and it has two origins, neither of them the Eiffel Tower.
The first is literal and dates from the 1660s, when the lieutenant general of police ordered lanterns hung in every street to reduce crime — Paris was among the first cities in Europe to light itself systematically at night, and visitors remarked on it. The second is figurative: Paris as a centre of the Enlightenment, the Siècle des Lumières, where the same French word covers both light and intellectual illumination.
The Eiffel Tower's sparkle, by contrast, is very recent — the 20,000 flashing bulbs were installed for the millennium and stayed. It runs for five minutes on the hour after dark, and the tower's night lighting is protected by copyright, which is why photographs of it at night are technically restricted in a way daytime photographs are not.
The puzzle itself
99 pieces, finishing at 10 × 14 cm — about the size of a postcard. The box is 9 × 6 × 2 cm and fits a pocket. Recycled cardboard, packed without plastic. Reckon on half an hour to an hour.
A word on night scenes
Dark images are the harder kind of puzzle, and worth knowing before you start. Large areas of near-black give you very little colour information, so shape matching has to do more of the work than usual — the opposite of a bright daytime scene.
Start with the edge, which is over a third of the pieces, then pick out the lit areas and work outward from them into the dark. And use considerably more light than you would for a bright puzzle: a dark image under a dim lamp is genuinely unpleasant.
Matcha & CO
Piecely Puzzles
Matcha & CO
Iswari
