The BCD is a club for all puzzle enthusiasts, whether they do puzzles simply for pleasure or for research. We are based in the UK, but have a worldwide
membership. The club was founded in 1985, when a small group of jigsaw puzzle lovers met for an enjoyable evening, doing puzzles together and sharing information about them. They decided to create a club for fellow enthusiasts.
The BCD’s full title is the ‘Benevolent Confraternity of Dissectologists’, named after the first creators of puzzles in the early to mid C18th, who cut up maps as educational tools for children to put back together, and called them ‘dissected’ maps. The oldest such puzzle in existence today is John Spilsbury’s “Europe Divided into Its Kingdoms”, dated 1766.
If you like doing jigsaw puzzles, please join us and share in the fun! We meet quarterly, mainly in village halls, around the UK, and also have two virtual meetings annually on flickr and Zoom, to enable our international members to play a full part in the club. All these meetings, and our annual weekend house party, provide opportunities to do puzzles with friends, buy and sell puzzles, and have talks from some of the world’s best puzzle experts, cutters and restorers.
The BCD is a non-profit organisation, so the modest annual membership fee largely covers the cost of the production of our full colour quarterly magazine.
‘The Jigasaurus’ website, created by former BCD chairman David Shearer, is a library, or thesaurus, of jigsaw puzzles. Many of the world’s finest puzzles can be viewed in this ever-expanding archive, with input from collectors worldwide: The Jigasaurus
