The Winter 2015 edition of the BCD magazine comprised a dozen pages of interesting articles including two colour pages of pictures of some of the puzzles mentioned in them. A highlight was an article discussing two very interesting WW2 puzzles: the first “Seven Card-Playing Dogs”, each representing one of the countries involved in the struggle, was secretly produced by PRESISTO in Amsterdam during the war itself and proceeds from its sale used by the underground movement to feed Jews in hiding; the second, manufactured by USN from The Hague, shows the people of Amsterdam standing on the rooftops waving to planes dropping food parcels. School children were given the puzzle in May 1945 to celebrate the liberation. 
Puzzle historian Anne Williams contributed a short piece about the hundreds of pre-1900 English children’s puzzles and games that have crossed the Atlantic to be housed in the Cotsen Children’s Library at Princeton University in New Jersey. This collection also includes the best collection of 18th century Spilsbury puzzles in private ownership.
Another member, a lover of jigsaw research and catalogues, shared two pages of jigsaw puzzle advertisements from a reprint of a 1913 Gamages catalogue. On the lighter side, regular contributor Jo Tyler gave us an amusing account of his Master and Missus’ disastrously unsuccessful attempt to win a 1000 piece puzzle competition at a Jigsaw Puzzle festival in Newmarket!
Among the other articles in this issue were also a few on the recent September Cheltenham meeting – see the previous post for more information about that gathering’s proceedings.