A big annual gathering ----------------------

Puzzles competing in the best-design contest.

A table at the puzzle market.

Every year, since 1980, a major convention has brought together, by invitation only, collectors and creators of mechanical puzzles of every kind: secret boxes, wooden knots, Rubik's cubes, tangrams... The thirty-seventh edition of this International Puzzle Party took place in early August, for the first time in France, with a record turnout of nearly two hundred puzzlers from some twenty countries. The heart of the event unfolded over three extremely packed days: a design contest, an exchange of previously unseen puzzles, and a puzzle market. Ongoing discussions about the year's innovations, in a cheerful, playful atmosphere, carried on into the small hours of the night — for some, a clear sign of addiction.
Jerry Slocum, puzzle historian ---------------------------------------

Alain Zalmanski and Jerry Slocum

during the puzzle exchange.
With a group of enthusiastic friends, Jerry Slocum founded the International Puzzle Party (IPP) in 1978, with the aim of presenting and exchanging mechanical puzzles. An engineer by training and a historian of puzzles, he has contributed to numerous reference works: Puzzles Old and New: How to Make and Solve Them (University of Washington Press, 1986) and New Book of Puzzles, 101 Classic and Modern Puzzles to Make and Solve (Freeman, 1992) with Jacob Botermans; The Anchor Puzzle Book (self-published, 2012) with Dieter Gebhardt; the 1993 Horden reissue of the classic Professor Hoffman's Puzzles Old and New (Angelo John Lewis, Warne, 1893)…
Slocum is, above all, the author of three landmark works on the iconic puzzles — the 15 puzzle (The 15 Puzzle, self-published, 2006), the tangram (The Tangram Book, Sterling, 2003) and the Rubik's Cube (les Secrets du Cube, French translation POLE, 2010).
In 2006, he donated thirty-one thousand puzzles and four thousand books to the Lilly Library at Indiana University (Bloomington, United States). This was the first time such a collection had been made available to researchers and the general public.