The book was reinvented and translated by Joan Arnold and Lilli Denon with the name Il tesoro di Masquerade (Emme Edizioni). 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.Ī modified version of the book appeared in Italian, with a treasure buried in Italy. 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. On 7 August 1979, Williams and celebrity witness Bamber Gascoigne secretly buried the hare's casket at Ampthill Park. The key was to be Catherine of Aragon's Cross at Ampthill, near Bedford, casting a shadow like the pointer of a sundial. So I decided to make a real treasure, of gold, bury it in the ground and paint real puzzles to lead people to it. I recalled how, as a child, I had come across "treasure hunts" in which the puzzles were not exciting nor the treasure worth finding. If I was to spend two years on the sixteen paintings for Masquerade I wanted them to mean something. The casket was inscribed with the legend "I am the keeper of the jewel of Masquerade, which lies waiting safe inside me for you or eternity". He sealed the hare inside a small ceramic casket, both to protect the prize from soil and to foil attempts to locate the treasure using a metal detector. Īlong with creating the book, Williams crafted 18- carat (75%) gold and jewels into a large filigree pendant in the shape of a hare. On reaching the Sun, Jack finds that he has lost the treasure, and the reader is challenged to discover its location. 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). The book's theme, a hunt for a valuable treasure, became his means to this end.
Williams set out to create a book that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and then discard. 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. Two British physics teachers were later acknowledged to be the first to have correctly solved the puzzle. 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. 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. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts. 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. Masquerade: The Complete Book with the Answer Explained
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