Masquerade (book)

Masquerade

Front cover of first edition
Author	Kit Williams
Illustrator	Kit Williams
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre	Armchair treasure hunt
Published	1979
Publisher	Jonathan Cape
Pages	32

Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams, published in August 1979, that sparked a treasure hunt by concealing clues to the location of a jeweled golden hare, created and hidden somewhere in Britain by Williams. The book became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.

Challenged by Tom Maschler, of the British publishing firm Jonathan Cape, to "do something no one has ever done before" with a picture book, Williams set out in the 1970s to create a book of paintings that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and discard. The book's objective, the hunt for a valuable treasure, became his means to this end. Masquerade features fifteen detailed paintings illustrating the story of a hare named Jack Hare, who seeks to carry a treasure from the Moon (depicted as a woman) to her love object, the Sun (a man). On reaching the Sun, Jack finds that he has lost the treasure, and the reader is left to discover its location.

Along with creating the book, Williams crafted a hare from 18-carat (75%) gold and jewels, in the form of a large filigree pendant on a segmented chain. He sealed the hare inside a ceramic hare-shaped casket (both to protect the prize from the soil, and to foil attempts to locate the treasure with a metal detector). 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".

Kit Williams later 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."