Masquerade

"I was 13 when this book came out in your country in 1981, and I fell in love with it. It’s one of the books that made me love puzzles. It’s a beautiful book. The illustrations are weird and delightful. Kit Williams was the artist and his style, I think, is beautiful. But what made the book a sensation was that within these beautiful drawings and these cryptic little stories along the side, were hints to the location of an actual buried treasure: a golden sculpture of a rabbit. It caused a mania worldwide. There were thousands of people in England just going crazy looking for the rabbit, digging up gardens, trespassing, getting arrested, knocking on the door of the artist and demanding to know the answer. He got thousands of letters; some were even threatening. This went on for about two years before someone finally figured it out. It was an incredibly hard puzzle, and the answer was obscure. It was a monument to… That’s right. It cast a certain shadow at noon on the equinox and if you dug there, you would find it. There was a scandal because the person who won might have cheated, they knew the author’s ex-girlfriend or something like that. Regardless, it’s a gorgeous book. I loved the idea of putting hints in a book that lead to a real treasure. The book spawned an entire genre of books called armchair treasure hunts, where people would hide things. There’s an American version called The Secret where the author buried 12 treasures around North America. It also inspired me. In my book, I have a secret code in the introduction. If you solve that code and put it into the website, then it leads to this crazy puzzle hunt, written by these two brilliant puzzle makers. The person who solved it won $10,000 and the contest took about a month. It is too late in one sense. In another sense, it’s not because you can still play the puzzles online at thepuzzlerbook.com. They are fantastic. You don’t even need to buy the book, though I hope you do. It’s free entertainment because these puzzles are brilliant. They were written by a team of professional puzzle makers led by a man named Greg Pliska. They’re so weird and delightful. They’re puzzles about the history of puzzles, so you’ll learn about that too. They don’t call it a treasure hunt. They call it a ‘puzzle hunt.’ But it is very similar. Going to the MIT Mystery Hunt was one of the adventures in my book. It’s where I met the people who wrote the puzzles for my contest. It’s a crazy annual event. It’s like an ironman triathlon for nerds. It’s 2,000 of the smartest people you can imagine, who come to Boston to the campus of MIT and spend 72 hours solving about 150 of the hardest, most baffling puzzles you can imagine. It’s a team competition and the team that finds the penny on the MIT campus wins. These puzzles don’t even have instructions. You will get a box of fortune cookies with strange symbols on the inside. You ask yourself, ‘What the heck is going on?’ And you try to figure it out. The answer is always a word. Once you get the word, you get the next puzzle. It’s hilarious and delightful."