John E Wright & Co launched Mapland Scotland....

05 February 2008, 1:42pm

John E Wright & Co launched Mapland Scotland...the largest map of Scotland ever produced!

Every now and again, people come up with strange and wonderous ways of realising unique ideas in print. One such project that has really stirred the imagination is a variation on a very old theme – the jigsaw puzzle.

Jigsaw puzzles have been around for hundreds of years and it is widely agreed that the first jigsaw puzzle was produced in 1767 by John Spilsbury, a London engraver and mapmaker.

His first jigsaw puzzle was a map of the world. Spilsbury attached a map to a piece of wood and then cut out each country - the end product was an educational resource, designed as an aid in teaching geography to British children and until about 1820, jigsaw puzzles remained primarily educational tools.

In 1880, dissections (the original term for jigsaws) came to be known as jigsaw puzzles, although they were actually cut by a fretsaw, not a true jigsaw and cardboard puzzles were first introduced, primarily for children's puzzles. Thus, in the early 1900's the golden age of jigsaw puzzles arrived, and with both wooden and cardboard jigsaw puzzles available, companies like Chad Valley and Victory in Great Britain and Einson-Freeman and Viking in the United States were producing a wide range of puzzles for a demanding and varied audience.

Yesterday saw the launch of the largest map of Scotland ever produced – and a return to the origins of the jigsaw puzzle - consisting of 167 giant jigsaw pieces and produced by John E Wright & Co in Nottingham for Map and Marine Limted in Argyll, specifically with the aim of providing an innovative educational resource to schools and colleges throughout Scotland.

On December 20th, 2007, children from Kilchrennan Primary School were the first to complete the jigsaw and yesterday children from Liberton Primary School completed the jigsaw in front of film crews and journalists at Our Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh.

The map data was provided by Ordnance Survey. Paula Langford-Smith, Ordnance Surveys’ Marketing Manager who attended the launch comments, “ This is a genuinely innovative use of Ordnance Survey mapping data that brings together not just geography but maths, science, language and history. The different ways that children can interact with the map make it fun, entertaining and educational.”
Management and development of the printing and cutting of the map fell to leading graphics provider John E Wright & Co Ltd.

Lee Whiteman, Sales Director at John E Wright & Co said, “We were approached by Suzanne Hills of Map and Marine Limited to find a way of dealing with the enormous task of electronically stitching the digital map data together. This created massive image data files, which were printed onto 3ml foamex using our in-house NUR Tempo and finally cut with a Zund XL2500 to produce the 167 jigsaw pieces that make up Mapland Scotland. Each jigsaw piece is approximately 1m x 0.7m, making up a total area of 120 square metres and shows Scotland to scale at 2cm to 1km.”
“The enormity of the job was staggering, “ Whiteman continues, “dealing with massive files and guaranteeing the accuracy of print and cut to ensure that the job produced a working product that would not only be visually stunning but durable and portable was paramount. Knowing that Mapland Scotland would be shown around schools and colleges, we had to make sure that the pieces would be durable enough to withstand the daily knocks and usage that school kids would put the map under and to see it here today at launch is the culmination of a lot of hard work and collaboration between a number of professional organizations. We are delighted to have been able to play a part in making the idea of Mapland Scotland a reality.”

www.johnewright.com

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