LCPP - Part I

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

Lewis Carroll

Welcome! It’s the start of something new here at Boxes and Booze, a new website launched with a new series. Make yourself at home, take a stroll around, pour yourself a drink, and let me know what you think. There’s an easy email sign up for occasional news and updates at the bottom of the screen, and a contact form – I’d love your feedback. There are filtered categories of boxes and booze, finally, and a search bar down below to help quickly find what you are looking for. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks, too!

Over the next few weeks I’ll be taking you on an adventure down the rabbit hole. Many have heard tales of this fabled project, and it is time to celebrate the makers. It all begins at Christ Church, Oxford, in the afternoon on Jul 4, 1862. Deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, reverend, scholar, mathematician, inventor and writer, set out on a typical rowing adventure with his young charges, the children of Christ Church’s Dean, Henry Liddell, whose youngest daughter Alice was among the party. He recounted a tale of a young girl’s astonishing adventure to another land, full of absurd characters, word play and logic games, and Alice implored him to write it all down. The books Alice in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, written under Dodgson’s pen name Lewis Carroll, would bring him fame, fortune, and become two of the most beloved children’s books of all time.

Lewis Carroll loved word play, riddles, logic, and games of all sorts. Through the Looking Glass is even staged as an actual game of narrative chess, with Alice the pawn becoming Queen and Champion. The Lewis Carroll Puzzle Project, an international collaboration of artists and their puzzle box creations, would have tickled him. Each box in the set takes its name and theme from a character or element found in the stories. Each box is a wonderful treasure, and there is no particular order – they are all meant to be together – so I will present them alphabetically by artist.

I started Boxes and Booze symbolically with an Egg many years ago, and it couldn’t be more fitting to be starting this new site with one as well. The talented Dr. Stephen Chin, diabolical dentist by day and wily wood turner by weekend, is rather fond of making puzzle eggs. It was only natural, and inevitable, that he would choose the egg from Through the Looking Glass– Humpty Dumpty. In the story, Humpty “grinned almost from ear to ear” prompting Alice to think, “If he smiled much more the ends of his mouth might meet behind, … and then I don’t know what would happen to his head! I’m afraid it would come off!” Stephen channels this grin in his usual whimsical way – his Humpty is sticking out his tongue at you, and he does indeed lose his head.

Humpty is a geometric interlocking puzzle known as the “Barrcode Burr”, a puzzle that was invented by the genius woodworker Lee Krasnow. Stephen Chin is the only other person to have recreated it, with permission, in wood. He tried for years to create a spherical version and very nearly gave up, but the Lewis Carroll project gave him one last nudge to try again. I’ll quote myself from a prior explanation: Because of the complex architecture of the identical pieces that form the Barcode Burr, it should be impossible to replicate the structure as a sphere. This is because turning it on a lathe would erase certain structural components and undercuts and it will all explode or collapse. Enter Stephen Chin’s particular form of genius. He finally devised a way to successfully create it, by truncating certain parts (reducing the edges), imagining the spherical shape, and then stellateing other pieces back on again to continue the formation. I don’t pretend to understand the process, but it worked. The original cube uses 60 individual pieces of wood. Humpty uses 100. That’s a lot of pieces for the King and his men to put together. To take apart will require 124 moves in total, with 64 needed just for the first piece. You will have to keep going, though, if you want to retrieve the hidden token – which technically makes this a puzzle box as well!

This remarkable set of puzzle boxes inspired me to celebrate and toast them properly with special cocktails centered around an apropos theme as well. One of Lewis Carroll’s most famous “nonsense” poems is the Jabberwocky, recited from a book Alice finds in Through the Looking Glass. Fast forward fifty-nine years (just a few years before her death) and Alice could have read about a very different beast found in the “coolest book in the world” – the Savoy Cocktail Book. Published in 1930, the book was the opus of Harry Craddock, an English born American ex-pat who fled Prohibition and set up shop at the Savoy in London. The title page reads: “Being in the main a complete compendium of the Cocktails, Rickeys, Daisies, Slings, Shrubs, Smashes, Fizzes, Juleps, Cobblers, Fixes and other Drinks, known and vastly appreciated in this year of grace 1930, with sundry notes of amusement and interest concerning them, together with subtle Observations upon Wines and their special occasions. Being in the particular an elucidation of the Manners and Customs of people of quality in a period of some equality.”

There is one cocktail in the book which is the basis and inspiration for all of the cocktail pairings and toasts for the Lewis Carroll Puzzle Project, which take further inspiration from the individual puzzle boxes as well. The “Jabberwock cocktail” is ascribed to Harry Craddock himself, and was a Prohibition era classic that was all but lost to obscurity until a few years ago when the defining ingredients, Caperitif, was resurrected from the pages of lost vintage spirits. The Humpty Dumpty cocktail takes the four ingredients – gin, dry sherry, Caperitif and bitters – and breaks them up with complimentary spirits. It’s a cocktail in pieces, and oh so delicious to put back together again. Cheers!

Humpty Dumpty

½ oz gin

½ oz Old Tom gin

½ oz Manzanilla sherry

½ oz Oloroso sherry

½ oz Caperitif

½ oz Meletti

1 d orange bitters

1 d grapefruit bitters

Stir ingredients with ice and strain into a favorite glass. Cracked lemon peel garnish. Don’t set it down on the wall!

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