Masquerade Artwork (1979)

I have such fond memories of this strangely occult and pagan-themed book, which I remember leafing through with amazement whilst at Junior school. After decades mostly out of the public eye, the iconic treasure from Masquerade resurfaced on the market and now belongs to a collector once more. In November 2025, Sotheby’s offered the same golden hare at auction again. The pendant originally sold for £31,900 in 1988, but this time it fetched £82,550, well above its pre-sale estimate. It was bought by a private collector in Great Britain.

Masquerade is a beautifully illustrated puzzle book created in 1979 by the English artist Kit Williams. At first glance it looks like a whimsical fairy tale about a small hare named Jack who travels through a dreamlike world, but every page is quietly doing something else: hiding clues. Williams embedded riddles in the paintings, borders, and lettering so that careful readers could piece together a set of directions leading to a real, physical treasure.

That treasure was a small golden hare pendant, made of 18-carat gold and decorated with jewels. Williams buried it somewhere in the English countryside and announced that whoever solved the puzzle in the book could claim it. The idea captured the public imagination. Hundreds of thousands of people studied the illustrations with magnifying glasses, looking for patterns, hidden words, and visual jokes that might reveal the location. After nearly three years, the hare was found in Ampthill Park in Bedfordshire, though the circumstances of its discovery later caused controversy, since it was revealed that the finder had been tipped off rather than having fully solved the puzzle as intended.

The book itself became a cultural phenomenon. It essentially invented what is now called the “armchair treasure hunt,” a genre where readers try to solve elaborate puzzles from home using only what is hidden in a book. Even today, Masquerade is admired not just as a clever game but as a work of art, full of intricate, symbolic paintings that reward close attention.

Kit Williams, the creator of Masquerade, was born in 1946 in Kent, England. Trained as an artist, he wrote and illustrated the book entirely on his own, combining traditional painting techniques with a love of riddles, myths, and visual storytelling. After the success of Masquerade, he went on to design elaborate mechanical clocks for public buildings and continued working as a fine artist, producing detailed figurative paintings in oils. His reputation rests largely on how he merged art, story, and puzzle into a single experience, turning a picture book into one of the most famous real-world treasure hunts in history.