Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams and published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by including concealed clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare that had been created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.

In March 1982 Williams received a letter and sketch from a man called Dugald Thompson, which he acknowledged as the first correct solution to the puzzle, meaning that Thompson had won the contest. It was later found that Thompson had not solved the puzzle and had guessed the hare's location using insider knowledge obtained from a former acquaintance of Williams. The revelation caused a minor scandal. Two other persons were later acknowledged to be the first to have correctly solved the puzzle.

Book

In the 1970s, Williams was challenged by Tom Maschler, of the British publishing firm Jonathan Cape, to do "something no one has ever done before" with a picture book. Williams set out to create a book that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and then discard. The book's theme, a hunt for a valuable treasure, became his means to this end. Masquerade contains fifteen detailed paintings that illustrate the story of a hare named Jack Hare, who seeks to carry a treasure from the Moon (depicted as a woman) to the Sun (depicted as a man). On reaching the Sun, Jack finds that he has lost the treasure, and the reader is challenged to discover its location.

Kit Williams later said:

<blockquote>If I was to spend two years on the sixteen paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across "treasure hunts" in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon's Cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial.</blockquote>

On 7 August 1979, Williams and celebrity witness Bamber Gascoigne secretly buried the hare's casket at Ampthill Park. Williams announced publicly that his forthcoming book contained all clues necessary to identify the treasure's precise location in Britain to "within a few inches." At the time, the only additional clue he provided was that the hare was buried on public property that could be easily accessed. To ensure that readers from further afield had an equal chance of winning, Williams also announced that he would accept the first precisely correct answer sent to him by post.

A modified version of the book appeared in Italian, with a treasure buried in Italy.

Legacy

Dugald Thompson founded a software company called Haresoft, and offered the jewel as a prize to a new contest which took the form of a computer game, Hareraiser. The company and its game (which many believe to be unsolvable with only meaningless text and graphics), were unsuccessful, yielding no winner. When the company went into liquidation in 1988, the hare was sold at Sotheby's London on behalf of the liquidators, Peat Marwick, in December 1988. The hare sold for £31,900 to an anonymous buyer. Williams himself went there to bid, but dropped out at £6,000.

The hare was on display at the V&A Museum, London, as part of its "British Design 1948–2012" retrospective in 2012.

Masquerade became the forerunner of an entire genre of cryptic puzzles known as armchair treasure hunts. It spawned a succession of books and games from other publishers seeking to emulate its success, including The Piper of Dreams (Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), The Secret (Bantam Books, 1982), The Golden Key (William Maclellan, 1982), Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse (Intravision, 1984), The Key to the Kingdom (Pavilion Books, 1992), The Merlin Mystery (Warner Books, 1998) and the French On the Trail of the Golden Owl (Manya, 1993), which was solved in October 2024. Kit Williams himself also created a second treasure-hunt book, The Bee on the Comb (1984).

Similar hunts have continued being published in various formats. Alkemstone (Level-10, 1981), a computer game developed during the height of the Masquerade hype, is still unsolved. Pimania (Automata UK, 1982) was solved in 1985, with the winners correctly deducing that the competition's £6,000 golden sundial would be located at Litlington White Horse in East Sussex, England. Many later hunts make use of technologies that were unavailable when Masquerade was published, such as the web-based homage Menagerie, the CD-ROM based Treasure Quest, and Text4Treasure, which uses SMS messaging. Others, such as Army of Zero and West by Sea: A Treasure Hunt That Spans the Globe (Expeditionaire, 2016) follow Masquerade use of physical media for the main puzzles, but provide additional clues online.

The book is one of the subjects presented in Brian Moriarty's 2002 presentation "The Secret of Psalm 46" in regarding to game design, easter eggs, and conspiracy theory.

References

Select bibliography

  • Kit Williams, Masquerade, London: Jonathan Cape, 1979 <small>()</small>
  • Kit Williams, Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained , London: Jonathan Cape, 1982 [paperback] <small>()</small>
  • Bamber Gascoigne, Quest for the Golden Hare, London: Jonathan Cape, 1983 <small>()</small>
  • Page-by-page explanation of the solution
  • Additional details of the scandal