The New York Times – The coronavirus has sent businesses racing as demand surges past levels seen at Christmas.”…Now, with much of the world under lockdown and looking to kill time, jigsaw puzzles have taken on new role: a tool to save humanity. Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, even referred to jigsaws as essential, and allowed people to leave the house to buy them…Ravensburger, a German puzzle maker with global sales of about $600 million, has been trying to meet the sudden blizzard of orders even as social-distancing measures have limited the number of puzzles it is able to produce at its factory in the south of Germany. The company can’t easily ramp up production, because each new puzzle takes weeks to create. Each puzzle piece must be uniquely shaped, to avoid one accidentally fitting into the wrong place. That means 1,000 different shapes for a 1,000-piece puzzle, each drawn by hand by workers. Before a puzzle is cut for the first time, each piece is sketched on a sheet of paper draped over the finished image. Pieces of metal are then shaped to form an elaborate cookie cutter made just for that jigsaw puzzle; it takes about four weeks to build one. The cutter can be used only a limited number of times before its edges are dulled. It can be resharpened once and must then be discarded. At busy times of the year, the company will go through several cutters a day…”