Advent Calendar: Day 9

By Circe -

Armchair treasure hunts are another long-running fascination of mine, occasionally dovetailing with the aforementioned obsession with lost things. The Ur-example is the 1979 book "Masquerade" by Kit Williams, a 32-page picture book whose text and illustrations contained clues to the whereabouts of a bejeweled golden hare that had been buried somewhere in Britain. Someone did solve that one, although it's been disputed whether he used just the book or leveraged previous knowledge of Williams' doings around the time of the project. Presumably considering that too much trouble to go through again, Williams' followup, known at first as "the bee book" or "book without a name", merely challenged the reader to use the contents to guess the book's intended title, which turned out to be "The Bee on the Comb". 

A number of others have been published since, mostly of the "solve-the-riddle" variety. I remember my parents buying "Animalia" and "The Eleventh Hour", both by Graeme Base, as family activities when I was a child.


Perhaps the most infamous of them, at the time of this writing, is "The Secret" by Byron Preiss. Published in 1982, the book contains 12 beautifully-rendered images and 12 cryptic verses. Each image matches a verse, and each of those combinations refers to a North American city, and the location within it where a small clay casque is buried, in which lies a small treasure. In the nearly three decades since publication, only three of the casques have been found and retrieved. The one in Chicago was found the very next year; the one in Cleveland was found in 2005. The Boston casque was not retrieved until 2019, and that was just in time -- the solvers literally had to ask a construction crew tearing up the site, "Hey, did you find anything weird while you were digging?" 

Preiss passed away in 2005, and so far as anyone can find out, he failed to leave the full solution with anyone before he went. Subsequent interviews with the illustrator have confirmed that the cities have all been guessed correctly, but he unfortunately knows nothing about the verses. For the current state of the hunt, FAQs and a podcast are available at https://12treasures.com/.

-------------------

If you want to see non-Advent Calendar posts during the holiday season, jump on over to my Patreon, and check out the different rewards. Subscribers get to see blog posts 24 hours early, videos of my dance work, extra essays about more personal subjects, and other things as they come to me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

By Circe -
About a week ago, I crewed a show at the studio theater for a non-profit outfit up from New York. The guys who run it are friends of our executive artistic director, and they come up two or three times a year. I like them; I dealt with them a bunch when I was at the box office, because when you're the most experienced person they have around they hand you all of the EAD's friends, and I have an unofficial standing request to work their shows even when I'm not the only crew who is both in town and not drowning in finals. One of the guys, as it turns out, is laid up with an injury right now, so the other one had to fly solo, on top of performing in the show. I ran into him coming down the stairs as I was going up, and as soon as he saw me he just lit up like, oh, it's you!  How are you are you working are you going to be my box office again! I told him I'd swapped over to doing tech and he asked if I was disappointed that I didn't get to dress up anymore. I
Read more

The mystery of "Himmmm"

By Circe -
[Note: This entry has been edited from its original publication. See here for explanation.] The gossip blogs are alight today with the breaking news that some dude who leaves a lot of comments at a site called Crazy Days And Nights  under the screen name "Himmmm" is "really" Robert Downey, Jr. Nobody has any proof, of course, and there has been no comment from RDJ -- possibly because the story is too new, possibly because it's true and he'd rather not have to lie, possibly because it's not true and he thinks it's too funny for words. Normally, I just laugh at these things, because really, who the fuck cares beyond the entertainment value? But one of the more interesting things about "Himmmm" is that he seems to have made it a point to go after people who have done Really Bad Things. He's most famous for popping in and letting other commenters play 20 Questions about who's being talked about in the most recent blind item, and  c
Read more

WARNING! Sweeping generalizations inside!

By Circe -
Captain Awkward -- who is one of my new favorite people, by the by -- has apparently been getting a lot of flack from her post about creepiness and how not to engage in it . I say flack specifically because it's not necessarily all directed at her personally, but when you're in the middle of a field of anti-aircraft guns all firing in random directions, you're likely to get some shrapnel in your hide whether anyone is aiming at you or not. One of the running arguments down in the comments (in her blog, in other blogs, on reddit, on the astral plane, etc.) is about whether it makes a difference whether someone is painfully socially awkward, has Asperger's or an autism spectrum disorder, or is just a boundary-free creepy fucker, whether these things are comorbid a lot, and what to do about it. I think it's really damn easy to tell the difference between them, myself. I suspect it's because I do tact about like a Panzer tank does ballet. The people who seem to
Read more