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Masquerade (1979)
- 88 statements
- 16 feature instances
- 8 referencing feature instances
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Masquerade is a children's picture & puzzle book painted by Kit Williams and published in 1979.The plot is fairly simple: The moon loves the sun, and to show how much she loves him, she gives a token of love to be delivered by the fastest creature around: Jack Hare. The hare then travels quickly through the country, and finally speaks to the sun, but finds that he's been careless and has lost the gift he was supposed to deliver, and the reader is tasked with finding where he dropped it.That's the plot, but it's not the story....When the book was published, an elaborate golden jewel pendant shaped like a hare - designed and crafted by Williams himself - was buried somewhere in Britain, with the promise that the book would act as a guide to help find it. Each of the pictures was surrounded by cryptic text, and had hidden images, odd symbology and weird puzzles in. Lots of puzzle fans scoured through, trying to find the location of the hare, mapping the locations painted, working the implications of symbols, mixing the words into anagrams until they made something like sense, and then finally driving out to the back end of nowhere and digging a hole. And coming home disappointed. Eventually, three years later, the treasure was dug up, and Williams announced the contest closed.It turns out that the winner (Dugald Thompson) had not cracked the fiendishly complicated clues; he simply knew people close enough that he had a good idea where the treasure was buried, and caught onto two physics teachers, Mike Barker and John Rousseau, who had worked out the secret, but had overlooked the box where they were digging. Williams was naturally crestfallen when he found out that he had been deceived and the real winners had lost out on the prize to a con-man.note Karma eventually caught up to Thompson and his partners in crime when the software company he started with the hare as collateral went bankrupt, and the liquidators took possession of the hare and sold it at Sotheby's in the late 1980s. Barker and Rousseau didn't even see the hare for themselves until they were invited to a special one-day exhibit of Williams' paintings in 2009 to which the hare's then-current owner had loaned it.Of course, like any such thing, the revelation that the puzzle was solved didn't convince some more hardcore enthusiasts, who would continue to dig holes in the middle of nowhere for a few more years. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_107e0220 | type |
Moon Rabbit | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_107e0220 | comment |
Moon Rabbit: The Moon chooses Jack Hare, the book's version of the rabbit perceived by many cultures in the shape of the craters on the near side of the Moon to the Earth, as her messenger to take the Sun a token of her love for him. Unfortunately, Jack drops it along the way, and it's up the reader to find it. | |
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I Just Want to Have Friends | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_26764512 | comment |
I Just Want to Have Friends: The Sun, though usually depicted as smiling, is deeply unhappy thanks to believing that he is ugly, and that's why people squint when they look at him. As a result, he is lonely and longs for companionship. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_2bc77899 | type |
I Am Not Pretty | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_2bc77899 | comment |
I Am Not Pretty: From the way everyone screws up their faces when they look directly at him, the Sun thinks he must be "terribly ugly", and has fallen into a lonely depression as a result. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_40e8f166 | type |
Night and Day Duo | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_40e8f166 | comment |
Night and Day Duo: The premise of the story is the attraction between the Moon and the Sun; despite ostensibly being opposites, they have fallen in love with each other, and Jack Hare is sent to speak to the Sun with a token of the Moon's affection for him. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_641cf81d | type |
Viewers Are Geniuses | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_641cf81d | comment |
Viewers Are Geniuses: A children's book, he called it. To put it in perspective, the two people who ultimately solved the puzzle (legitimately) were physics teachers. There are numerous clues in the illustrations regarding how to determine which letters in the cryptic text are relevant to the solution (here's a hint: notice that many people's and animals' hands and feet are bent into awkward-looking positions), but they're hidden among so many red herrings that it's hellishly difficult to sort the useful clues from the useless ones. And then, once you've got the phrase hidden around the fifteen illustrations,note Broken down by page, "Catherine's / long finger / over / shadows / earth / buried / yellow / amulet / midday / points / the / hour / in / light of equinox / look you." you still have to translate that into a locationnote The first letter of each page's word or phrase spells CLOSEBYAMPTHILL, with the hare buried in Ampthill Park where the statue of Catherine of Aragon's longest finger casts a shadow at noon on the equinox (approximately, anyway; Williams later admitted the calculations were slightly off, which he didn't realise at the time since he buried the box at night, with University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne as a witness).. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_75b23b58 | type |
Sundial Waypoint | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_75b23b58 | comment |
Sundial Waypoint: The official solution was to find the point of a shadow at a specific time of the year. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_780a82c3 | type |
Magic Square Puzzle | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_780a82c3 | comment |
Magic Square Puzzle: The "penny-pockets lady" in the fourth illustration has a 4x4 magic square hanging from her belt; the numbers are in the same arrangement as in the magic square in Albrecht Dürer's 1514 engraving Melencolia I, but with an empty space where the 7 should be. It doubles as one of the most important clues to how to solve the book's main riddle thanks to the correspondence between its numbers and the colours and letters on the paper on the wall in the twelfth illustration, and the numbers in the grid in the sand in the last illustration.How so? Look at the colours and letters in the same positions as the numbers in numerical order. The colours form the repeating pattern red, yellow, green, blue (the same as the pattern of the patches of the penny-pockets lady's skirt), and the puppeteer in the twelfth illustration has rings of those colours operating the strings on the puppets - red for left hand, yellow for left foot, green for right hand, blue for right foot. The letters pointed to by the characters' hands and feet are intended to be read in that order. The letters in the grid are the first letters of towns near Ampthill, and the numbers to which they correspond are their distances in miles from Ampthill (there is an empty space where the 7 should be). Meanwhile, the numbers in the grid on the last page tell how many letters are clued in by the illustration with the corresponding number in the magic square; two nonzero digits means two words, three nonzero digits means three words. So the first illustration yields one ten-letter word, the second yields a four-letter word and a six-letter word, the third yields a four-letter word, and so on (although the space corresponding to the absent 7 has Williams' initials in it instead of a nod to the six letters indicated by the seventh illustration). | |
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My God, What Have I Done? | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_a1b141f4 | comment |
My God, What Have I Done?: On the story page accompanying the seventh illustration (the Moon hanging upside-down), the people of the Earth are raising a terrible din as the Moon, having stayed behind instead of setting so that she can see that Jack carries out her task as instructed, has inadvertently caused an eclipse. Horrified at what she has done, she opens her mouth and screams. | |
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Shout-Out | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_c75df49a | comment |
Shout-Out: The girl in the fourth illustration (the "penny-pockets lady") was drawn to look like the daughter of Kit Williams' local chemist (pharmacist to North Americans). In the fourteenth illustration, the swimming girl is how Williams imagined his chemist's daughter would look as a teenager. Isaac Newton appears in the story as a supporting character (that's supposed to be him as the bearded puppeteer in the twelfth illustration, though all contemporary portraits of Newton show him as clean-shaven), and a paraphrase of his quote about seeing himself as a child on the seashore whose attention is diverted by smooth pebbles while a vast ocean of truth lies undiscovered in front of him appears on the final story page. | |
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Treasure Map | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_d1f4d528 | comment |
Treasure Map: A real life example. The book contains clues to the location of a buried golden hare, to be claimed by the first person to decipher the clues and dig in the location they indicated. (Well, that was the idea, anyway; it didn't go as planned...) | |
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Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_d8573ef9 | comment |
Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: Dugald Thompson's way of solving the puzzle; Veronica Robertson, the girlfriend of his business partner John Guard, had also been living with Kit Williams when he created Masquerade and knew just enough about the location of the hare to guide Thompson to it, in exchange for a promise to donate a share of his business profits to animal rights activists. | |
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Red Herring | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_dbca2c99 | comment |
Red Herring: One of the factors that made the puzzle nearly unsolvable was the ridiculous amount of false leads that were intentionally made much easier to find than the actual solutions. For a start, the story is completely incidental to the solution; the only relevant clues are in the illustrations, and even those are accompanied by stacks of irrelevant clues. The red letters in the cryptic text around each illustration, the "barbed" letters, the locations used in the paintings, the grid in the fifth illustration of atomic numbers whose corresponding symbols spell FALSE[S] NOUU THINK AGA[R]IN...note Williams said only four people reported spotting that at the time, and one was a ten-year-old girl. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_dbfeab87 | type |
Male Sun, Female Moon | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_dbfeab87 | comment |
Male Sun, Female Moon: The Sun and Moon here are portrayed as male and female, respectively. The book kicks off with the Moon falling in love with the handsome Sun, but being unable to approach him, due to their natures in the sky. So she sends Jack Hare off with a gift to declare her intentions. | |
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| Masquerade (1979) / int_f43568af | type |
Fictional Mystery, Real Prize | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_f43568af | comment |
Fictional Mystery, Real Prize: The premise of the entire work. Jack Hare and the love story between the Sun and the Moon may only exist in the realm of imagination, but the jewelled golden hare from the story is real, and the mystery of its location drove thousands of readers up the wall for years. | |
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Anthropomorphic Personification | |
| Masquerade (1979) / int_f76b8969 | comment |
Anthropomorphic Personification: The Moon and the Sun appear as people in the illustrations, and are thinking, feeling beings who have fallen in love with each other in the story. | |
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
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I Am Not Pretty / int_f53c3049 | |
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Magic Square Puzzle / int_f53c3049 | |
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Male Sun, Female Moon / int_f53c3049 | |
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Moon Rabbit / int_f53c3049 | |
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Night and Day Duo / int_f53c3049 | |
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Sundial Waypoint / int_f53c3049 | |
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Treasure Map / int_f53c3049 | |
| Masquerade (1979) | hasFeature |
Viewers Are Geniuses / int_f53c3049 |
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