Ravensburger - Magical Fairy Tale Hour 1000 Piece Puzzle

Four shelves of books packed spine to spine, and about every third book has come open and let something out. A unicorn on the second shelf, a knight two along from it, a puppet theatre up top with a zebra in it, and a dragon behind a parasol.

What you are looking at

An Aimee Stewart bookshelf painting, which is a genre she more or less invented and Ravensburger have published for years. A red-haired woman in a cream and teal gown is halfway up a wooden ladder with a lantern in her hand, reaching for the top shelf. Down in the bottom left an open book carries the line that sets the whole thing up: Once upon a time, in a kingdom filled with enchanted books, there was a girl who loved to read.

Then it is a hunt. A white unicorn standing in grass that is growing out of the shelf. A suit of armour. A castle with fireworks over it. An owl. A lighthouse and a hot air balloon at the top right, a full moon, a ship in full sail, a genie's lamp, a red parasol, candles burning on three different shelves, a figure in blue at the bottom right who is clearly on her way to a ball, and ivy coming down over all of it. In the centre, an open book pouring blue light and sparks upward.

What it is like to build

Any piece with legible lettering on it goes in a pile of its own. That is the single most useful thing you can do with this picture. The spines carry titles, and a word is worth more than a colour every time, because it fixes both the position and the rotation of the piece in one go.

Then the shelf edges, which cut the puzzle into four strips. They are dark wood horizontals running the full width, and they are easy. Once they are in, sort the book spines by strip and then by colour family, and work along each shelf. The books are vertical rectangles of flat colour, so the join between two spines is a straight vertical line, which is a much stronger cue than it sounds.

Leave the top. Behind the highest shelf there is a night sky with cloud and stars in it, and that is the only large area in the picture with no edges in it. The near-black gaps between books are the other hard pile, and they are best done last when the holes are telling you the answer.

Why Ravensburger for a picture with this much detail

Made in Germany since 1891. No two pieces share a shape, so on a picture where forty different objects are each rendered about three centimetres tall, a piece either seats or it does not and you never have to second guess it. Thick board, linen texture, low glare, which matters on an image this dark.

Specifications

A little context

The bookshelf puzzle is a category of its own now and Stewart is the reason. The appeal is not the picture so much as the search: you are not building a scene, you are finding forty small ones. We keep a shelf of her work at Aimee Stewart Puzzles, and the closest sibling to this one is Fantasy Bookshop, which pulls the camera back into the shop rather than up against the shelves.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.