the eternal masquerade.

Intricate puzzles that I haven't the slightest hope of solving fascinate me. And apparently this is also the case for Dan 'Bunny-Ears' Amrich, a journalist who works for Gamepro, and whose grinning visage, complete with those bunny ears, actually appears in the 'NBA Hangtime' arcade board I own. He has a fascinating site dedicated to Kit Williams and 'Masquerade', the beautifully illustrated book Kit wrote+drew in the early '80s which started the 'treasure hunt book' genre. There was an amazing hand-made jewel to be unearthed if you could follow the clues, and I distinctly remember the commotion about the book at the time, even though I was only 6 or 7 - I think my parents had a copy? As Dan's excellent FAQ mentions, the eventual winner was discovered, years later, to most probably have cheated, but there were two other close runners-up who _had_ deciphered the super-complex solution correctly. If you like the idea of this type of thing, the Armchair Treasurehunt Club has a list of some other treasurehunt prize books currently available - one of the most interesting is the magician David Blaine's 'Mysterious Stranger', with truly fiendish puzzle design courtesy of Cliff 'Fool's Errand Johnson.