A Montreal distributor of wall art that became a publisher.

Eurographics tells its own story briefly. On the “About Us” page of its website, the company says it was founded in 1987 and that it began as a small distributor of posters before growing into an art publisher and puzzle manufacturer. It describes itself as privately owned, and the copyright line on its site is in the name of Eurographics Inc. The company does not name its founders or owners on that page, and this guide does not either.

The poster origin still shapes how the company describes its customers. Eurographics says it makes art products for an international clientele of galleries, retailers, framers and museums. It also says it takes pride in the personal relationships it keeps with those customers, and that its staff come from many countries and work together on the range.

Montreal is where the work happens, by the company’s account. Eurographics says its head office and warehouse are both in Montreal, and that the building serves as the creative hub for its product development, sales, graphic design and customer service teams. The site is published in English and French, and it links to a separate website for Europe; shops and galleries buying for resale are directed to a wholesale section with its own login. The older domain eurographics.ca now forwards to the puzzle site at eurographicspuzzles.com, which is where the company’s catalogue and artist listings live.

A note on the name. “Eurographics” is also the name of the European Association for Computer Graphics, a learned society for computer-graphics researchers that runs its own conferences and publications. The two are unrelated; this guide is about the Montreal puzzle and art publisher.

A catalogue arranged like a print shop.

The Eurographics puzzle catalogue is organised the way a poster shop might sort its racks: by subject and by artist rather than by age group. On its website the company groups its jigsaws under headings such as Fine Art Masterpieces, Natural History Charts, Maps & Flags, History of Aviation, Space Exploration, Canadian Vintage Art and American Vintage Art, alongside photography collections, food puzzles and a dedicated kids’ range. Lighter themed shelves sit next to them, with names such as The Globetrotter Collection, Flavors of the World, Yoga Dogs & Cats and Save Our Planet, and the site also offers a filter for what it calls cognitive puzzles.

The chart puzzles are the most recognisable strand. Collections of anatomy and science charts, animal charts and natural-history charts present a grid of labelled specimens, objects or species on a single sheet — the format of an educational wall poster, cut into pieces. The fine-art strand works the same way with paintings: the company’s artist index lists old masters including Botticelli, Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Jacques-Louis David, modern names such as Chagall and Dalí, and Canadian painters including Emily Carr and Clarence Gagnon. Living illustrators and photographers sit in the same index, among them Lucia Heffernan and Dominic Davison, each with a collection of their own.

Formats have multiplied around the core rectangular box. The website lists collectible tins with puzzles inside, panoramic puzzles, lenticular puzzles with a 3D-view surface, 3D jigsaw puzzles, advent calendar puzzles, floor puzzles for children and puzzles packed in lunch bags. Licensed ranges appear as well, among them a Volkswagen collection of tins and puzzles, a Monster Jam collection and a Fourth Wing range tied to the fantasy novel. Beyond puzzles, the company sells playing cards, a line of bags it calls Artsy Bags, and puzzle accessories — roll-up mats, glue sheets, sorting trays and frames.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all jigsaw puzzle makers: Eurographics, Galison, Castorland, Jumbo, MasterPieces, Heye and Mudpuppy. Puzzle brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to larger toy, games or publishing groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a toy shop to a museum gift store.

A puzzle brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single picture than by a box, a name and the artwork it commissions, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its puzzles are actually made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its puzzles are made and how its boxes have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A puzzle maker in the spotlight of 2020.

The company surfaced in the national news during the first weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Canadians stuck at home turned to jigsaws. On 10 April 2020, CBC Radio’s Day 6 reported on the rush for puzzles through the experience of the Canadian brand Cobble Hill, whose owner said the factory making its puzzles had shut and stock had run out. The same report noted that other puzzle makers, Ravensburger and Eurographics among them, had also had to suspend online sales.

What the brand looks like comes mostly from the pictures it licenses. Because the catalogue is built from paintings, vintage posters, scientific charts and photographs, the box art changes from title to title, and the Eurographics name works as a publisher’s imprint across all of it. The company’s own description of itself as an art publisher as well as a puzzle maker fits that arrangement.

The poster business it started with is still visible in the subjects the company returns to: the map, the flag chart, the botanical plate, the aviation poster, the travel advertisement and the gallery painting. Around them the company has added tins, lenticular surfaces and licensed titles.

For a design guide, Eurographics shows how a poster publisher can carry its print-shop habits — subject collections, named artists, chart layouts — into jigsaws — compare Cobble Hill, the Canadian puzzle brand in the same CBC report, and Ravensburger. For this guide we use gallery oxblood, frame gold and chart teal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Eurographics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.