Kit Williams is the author of Masquerade (Jonathan Cape, London, 1979, ISBN 0224016172), a pictorial story book which contained clues to the location of a genuine valuable golden hare buried by Williams, and witnessed by Bamber Gascoigne, "somewhere in Britain".

Kit Williams said:

"If I was to spend two years on the 16 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."

When the book was published in 1979 the world went crazy, selling hundreds of thousands of copies world wide, obviously many in the UK, but also in Australia, South Africa, Germany, Japan, France and the USA to name but a few.

The treasure was found about two years after the book was published.

In 1988 the Sunday Times (London) revealed that the people who found the treasure did not do so by solving the puzzle. The boyfriend of Williams' ex-girlfriend and an accomplice used her knowledge of the rough location of the treasure, together with metal detectors, to locate it. Williams was shocked to discover this and is quoted as saying:

"This tarnishes Masquerade and I'm shocked by what has emerged. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to all those many people who were genuinely looking for it. Although I didn't know it, it was a skeleton in my cupboard and I'm relieved it has come out."

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

Williams wrote another puzzle book; the puzzle was to figure out the title of the book (Jonathan Cape, London, 1984, ISBN 0224019066) and represent it without using the written word. This time the competition ran for just a year and a day and the winner was revealed on the live BBC TV chatshow Wogan.

Today, solving these kind of puzzles is knows as Armchair Treasure Hunting. This name was given to it by Dan James. He founded The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club.

External links

• Masquerade FAQ (http://www.bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/faq.html)
• Untitled book FAQ (http://www.bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/bee.html)
• The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club (http://www.treasureclub.net)