Ravensburger -The Bizarre Bookshop No 2 (Colin Thompson) 1000 Piece Puzzle

A wall of bookshelves in which the books have stopped behaving like books. Colin Thompson draws impossible libraries, and this is the second Bizarre Bookshop. You will still be finding things in it a week after you finish.

What you are looking at

Shelving from edge to edge, floor to ceiling, crammed with several hundred hand-drawn book spines in every colour. Except the books keep turning into other things. One has a full-grown tree growing out of it. Another opens into a rainbow. One is a doorway with a staircase behind it. A spine becomes a red telephone box, another a red pillar box, another a row of shopfronts with a fire escape. Ladders lean between shelves that could not possibly connect.

In the centre, a great arched alcove framing a sepia drawing of a ruined colonnade, with a scarlet book flying out of it. A brass gramophone horn above with a scroll of paper unfurling from it. A sign reading GONE TO DINNER. Another reading BOOKS ARE COOL. BUY ONE TODAY. Pink mice on nearly every shelf if you look, a tiny blue figure in a hat and cape, toadstools, balloons, an old Brownie camera, a boot with a garden growing out of it, and a fairy on a mushroom.

What it is like to build

The shelves are your grid, so build them first. Every horizontal shelf edge is a hard straight line of pale timber running across the picture, and the vertical dividers cut it into boxes. Get that skeleton down and every remaining piece belongs in one compartment rather than one of a thousand places. It turns a chaotic image into forty small puzzles.

Then work compartment by compartment. Each has its own colour run, because Thompson groups his spines tonally. The oddities, the tree, the telephone box, the arch, the gramophone, are the easiest things in the box and worth placing early as landmarks.

It is dense but it is not cruel. Almost every piece carries lettering, an edge or a distinct object, so unlike a sky there is nowhere you genuinely cannot progress.

Why the Ravensburger cut matters here

Made in Germany since 1891. On artwork with this much fine linework the print quality is doing as much as the cut: if the tiny hand-lettered spine titles do not reproduce, half the picture stops working. No two pieces in a 1000 piece share a shape, and the thick board with its linen-textured low-glare finish keeps a very busy image readable under a lamp.

Specifications

A little context

Colin Thompson is one of a small number of artists who sell a puzzle on the name rather than the picture, and he is Australian-based, which is not something we can say about many names in this category. His bookshop and library images are numbered, people collect them in sequence, and back numbers go out of print rather than being reprinted. Derived from multiple public data sources across retail, search and community platforms, refreshed 31 August 2026.

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.