Art: Jig-Stone Puzzle

Back in the fabulous '20s, when William Randolph Hearst was collecting art, he casually bought a whole Spanish monastery one day. The 811-year-old building was dismantled and each statue and block of stone duly numbered. Then they were packed into 10,742 crates (made in a specially built sawmill) and sent 21 miles (on a specially built railroad) to a seaport, where freighters carried them to New York. Somehow Hearst never got around to playing with his new $500,000 building blocks. They sat in a Bronx warehouse until after his death last year, then were sold (for about $60,000) to a...

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