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Mechanical Puzzles Exhibition in Bloomington, Indiana |
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 Bloomington, Indiana, November 2001
Enigmas, Conundrums, and Baffling Things:
The Lilly Library Opens an Exhibition of the Slocum Puzzle Collection
An autumn exhibition of mechanical puzzles from the renowned Slocum Puzzle Foundation Collection comes to the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, offering visitors the opportunity to view and attempt to solve some of the most enigmatic and beautifully crafted puzzles in the world. The exhibition runs through Tuesday, December 18, 2001.
Painstakingly selected from a collection of over 27,000 puzzles of every imaginable shape, size, construction, and genre, and over 1,500 books about puzzles in all of their aspects, this exhibition features a wide range of pieces from the Slocum Puzzle Foundation Collection representing the varied life of puzzles throughout human history.
Ranging from such enormous twentieth century commercial successes as Rubik’s Cube to some of the world’s rarest and most precious Chinese tangrams, the Slocum Puzzle Collection provides an incomparably rich point of entry to the study of puzzles in their various historical, social, educational, scientific, intellectual, and philosophical dimensions.
Without question the world’s most foremost collector and scholar of puzzles of all kinds, Jerry Slocum has appeared on The Tonight Show to exhibit his puzzles and to discuss humankind’s intense fascination with puzzles throughout the ages. A seminal writer on the history of puzzles, Slocum has performed a valuable service in describing and categorizing the incredible variety of puzzles.
As such, this remarkable Lilly Library exhibition will contain representative examples of many genres of Slocum’s mechanical puzzles: Put-Together Puzzles, Take-Apart Puzzles, Interlocking Puzzles, Disentanglement Puzzles, Sequential-Movement Puzzles, Dexterity Puzzles, Puzzle Vessels, Vanish Puzzles, Folding Puzzles and, lastly, but quite significantly, Impossible Puzzles.
This remarkable exhibit provides an instructive and hands-on counterpart to the Lilly Libraries major exhibition, Math! The History of Mathematics in Science and Literature. |
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