The Shelves Have Never Been This Full, and the Four Kinds of Puzzler

Hi Premium Puzzlers,

The shelves have never been this full. 487 titles are in stock this morning, and there are 1,227 boxes behind me as I type this. When I took the store on in June it was a fraction of that.

August was the best month this store has had since the handover, on stock and on sales both, and I do not think those are two separate facts. Nearly every design that looked dead when I arrived turned out to be simply out of stock. Buy it back in, put it where someone can see it, and it sells again. That is most of what I have learned in two and a half months of running this place.

Six of the new arrivals

There are 165 titles in New Arrivals, most of them landed in the past fortnight, and they are deliberately not six of the same thing.

From Gibsons, Dining at Tenby is a 1000 piece at $39.99, a Welsh harbour town at low tide with every boat sitting on the mud.

From Heye, Zozoville: Chaperone is 1000 pieces at $37.99. Zozoville is a Berlin illustration studio and their work is odd in the best way, houses that should not be standing up and creatures that look faintly embarrassed to be there.

From Cobble Hill, Paradise is a 1000 piece at $34.99 that is essentially an aviary, and Where Gods Reside is 1000 pieces at $34.99, all mountains and mist.

From Clementoni, the Museum series brings Munch's The Scream, 1000 pieces at $29.95, which is the most famous anxious face in Norway and a surprisingly pleasant thing to spend a week with.

And a Wasgij, Original 44: Summer Games, 1000 pieces at $34.99. If you have not met one before, the joke is that the picture on the box is not the picture you are building. You are assembling the scene the people in the artwork are looking at.

113 titles are back from sold out

This is the collection I am quietly proudest of, because every title in it is one somebody wanted and could not have.

Three worth naming. Ravensburger's The Fantasy Bookshop by Aimee Stewart, 1000 pieces at $39.99. Cobble Hill's Back To School, 1000 pieces at $32.99, nostalgia done properly rather than sentimentally. And Falcon's Glenridding, 1000 pieces at $36.99, on Ullswater in the Lake District.

One thing worth saying plainly, because it explains a lot about this shop. I buy two to five of most titles, not three hundred. You will see the words Sold Out here more often than you would on a bigger, blander store, and it also means a sold-out title is a signal I can act on. Those 113 are that signal working.

While we are on Aimee Stewart

She is one of a very small number of artists that Australians buy by name, which is to say people write to me asking what else of hers is coming in, rather than asking what else has a bookshop on it.

So we wrote a full guide to her work. How the images are actually made, which is neither painting nor photography but something assembled on a computer out of both. The three shapes her work takes, the shelf, the tabletop and the room, and why a shelf builds completely differently from a tabletop even at the same piece count. And the small fox she hides in the recent ones, which I did not know about until I started writing.

They know me at the post office now

Here is a number I am pleased with. Of every order placed in August, 94 per cent were packed and handed to Australia Post within one business day, and the middle of the pack was under sixteen hours. Nothing sat.

There is no warehouse behind that and no algorithm. There is me, a tape gun, and a walk down to the Bondi Beach post office often enough that the staff there now recognise the boxes before they recognise me.

The honest exception is the weekend. Order on a Saturday afternoon and it goes out Monday, because I cannot post what is shut. Everything else moves the same day or the next morning.

What kind of puzzler are you?

The thing that keeps surprising me is how differently two people describe the same afternoon at the same table. One of them is solving a problem. The other has gone somewhere else entirely and could not tell you where the last two hours went. Same box, completely different activity.

So we built a quiz to sort it out, and we built it on Carl Jung rather than on guesswork. Jung argued we each lead with one of four functions: sensation, thinking, feeling, intuition. Put that over a puzzle table and you get four puzzlers.

• The Absorbed. You do not solve puzzles. You disappear into them.
• The Architect. Edges first. Obviously edges first.
• The Romantic. You buy the picture, for a reason you might not say out loud.
• The Diviner. You know where it goes before you can explain why.

You have probably already picked yours, and most people are right. That is not the interesting part. Anything that only flatters you is a horoscope, and we did not want to write a horoscope, so each result has a second half we have called the shadow: the thing your type gets wrong. The one who never quite finishes. The one who goes cold and starts issuing rules about how the table is to be run.

Seven multiple choice questions, under a minute. Find out what you are.

A customer found a fault, and saved me from it

One of you wrote in to say the stamps on your Premium Puzzles Card did not look right. You were correct, and I am glad you said something rather than deciding it was not worth the email.

One setting was wrong. Any order with a discount code on it was being skipped entirely, so a puzzle bought in a sale earned no stamp at all. That is fixed, and every order earns a stamp from here, discount or no discount. I also went back through every order that missed out and added those stamps by hand, so nobody lost a single one.

Buy 10 puzzles and the 11th is free, on any 500 or 1000 piece title. Your card lives here.

Keep the recommendations coming

I read every reply, and there are several new brands on my list to bring in over the next few months, most of them there because somebody on this list asked.

Free shipping on every order over $150, anywhere in Australia. Near Bondi? Free local delivery within 6km, no minimum.

All the best,
Mike