Evanston resident Ursula Schwark looked over the puzzles at the Evanston Public Library’s Main Branch on Tuesday.
“We’ve done that one,” she told her husband at EPL’s Cookbook & Puzzle Swap, pointing at a 1,000-piece jigsaw. “And that one was ours, too.”
Schwark said she has been attending the library’s swaps for the past two years where patrons gather to exchange their used cookbooks and puzzles. She said her husband’s neurologist recommended they work on activities that require focus to combat his memory loss, so they always have somewhere between 500 and 1,500 wooden pieces spread across their dining room table.
For Christmas dinner, Schwark said she and her husband laid three tablecloths on top of their work in progress so they wouldn’t have to start over.
“Sometimes we would have brought a puzzle and he’ll go, ‘Hey, this one looks familiar, I think we had this one,’” she said. “So, it’s humorous. It’s an escape.”
Lifelong Learning and Literacy Librarian at EPL Katy Jacob helms the swap twice every other month and also manages the public puzzle table on the third floor. They said that after the swap, puzzles that patrons bring end up on the third floor for visitors to solve, return to the next swap and are then taken by a new owner.
“It’s a wonderful life cycle,” Jacob said. “It kind of feeds itself.”
Jacob added that the swaps also reduce the environmental impact of throwing away single-use books and games.
It was medical laboratory scientist Aiden Trinka’s first time attending the swap. He said he attended to exchange the many finished puzzles he had accumulated at home.
“I thought, ‘That’d be super fun,’ because then a puzzle that I don’t want to work on anymore because I’ve done it several times, someone else can enjoy,” Trinka said.
Despite a demanding work schedule, Trinka said he makes time for weekly trips to the puzzle table on the library’s third floor — and appreciates the library’s effort to offer free art and science events.
“They make a genuine effort to actually be a communal space,” Trinka added.
The cookbook and puzzle swap began at the Robert Crown Branch Library and moved to be exclusively held at the Main Library. Jacob said the swap usually receives 30 patrons, many of whom are recurring “puzzlers.”
For Trinka, piecing together traditional 500-1,000-piece puzzles only scratches the surface of his problem-solving. Games like Duotrigordle, the equivalent of solving 32 simultaneous Wordles, fuelled Trinka’s devotion to a career as a laboratory scientist.
“Pattern recognition, piecing together, that’s one of the things I like about laboratory science,” Trinka added. “That’s why I’m the person who tests after you get your blood drawn … and finding efficiency in triage patterns.”
Nonetheless, many patrons are new to the game. Jacob cited the pandemic as creating a boom in new puzzlers because home isolation created new habits.
“Some people just enjoy the quiet and the calm, putting things in a specific order, being able to control what we can control,” Jacob added. “A lot more people are into puzzles than they used to be because it can just be very calm.”
The next opportunity for puzzlers and cooks to gather and exchange items will be Jan. 11.
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