Welcom Jigsaw Puzzle Black Box Series from England - #1 The Mad Hatter's Tea Party

And now we come to perhaps the best known of the English puzzles, the Welcom puzzles.  First up, you guessed it, the Mad Tea Party!  Made by the Williams, Ellis & Co., Ltd. (Welcom) of London.  Sadly this company appears to no longer be in business.

I guess technically it is called The Mad Hatter's Tea Party, but geez, can we please get a new image already?  Oh yeah, tomorrow.

This is a pretty decent puzzle, it took me about an hour to put this together.  It is (as the box says) 9½ x 14 inches, and over 200 pieces.  I counted 204, so yes it is just barely over 200 pieces.

The black box series is a full set of Alice puzzles - called Alice in Disneyland - four in number, and are pretty hard to find.  Make that damn hard to find.  The boxes are nicely illustrated on all sides, with the top and bottom featuring the same art of Alice, the top with the picture of the puzzle, and the bottom with the list of available puzzles.  I must say Alice is slightly off model, and looks like she was rendered by the same artist as in a bizarre English book that I'll post soon.

Even the sides have cool headshots of various Wonderland denizens.

There is even a Baby Oyster!  And Bill!  And the Caterpillar!  Way ahead of their time...

Company name boldly emblazoned on either end.

I must admit, it was difficult getting nice images of all sides of the box.  As I alluded to in an earlier post, these boxes were really more like wrappers.  They are cardboard, but pretty thin cardboard, and they have end flaps rather than lids, and the end flaps are glued shut.  So to open the box you have to tear open the box, instantly destroying it.  I do have a full box unopened, but even it is in pretty bad shape since the puzzle itself takes up almost no space inside, and the boxes are easily crushed.  I put together a full box image below by scanning the best bits of several boxes.  Probably way more trouble than it was worth.  Like I've got better things to do with my spare time.

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