I remember when I was a kid there were lot of books that offered a prize to the first person to crack the puzzle within. Generally it was a relatively small book. Each page had a picture and some text. The text would tell a not very good story and the back of the book would tell you that included within was a set of multifaceted clues that would enable you to figue out the location of something valuable. Generally there’s a suggestion that the puzzle is well hidden, but a bright kid could crack it. For some reason whoever ran my local library was obviously a fan of these type of books, as they had quite a large collection. Leaving aside the fact that once someone who has the ability to get to wherever the object is hidden actually solves it, no-one who buys the book afterwards has any chance at all, were these books ever really legitimate? If not, how could they get away with such blatant false advertising?
This one was. I only found out about from the book about solving the mystery Quest for the Golden Hare many years later. It was a great read.
Kit Williams’s Masquerade was the first of these, I think, at least for the 80s surge in popularity. Williams also had another one, something about a golden bee. And I remember there was one about a hidden golden horse, as well.
Found a FAQ on the Untitled bee book by Williams!
And here’s a site about the golden horse book.
“A lot of books” is clearly an exaggeration. I think that there were maybe a half a dozen of them. Do you actually remember seeing dozens of such books at your local library?
It’s about 15 years ago so I don’t remember too clearly. By ‘a lot’ I meant maybe 10 or so. One is an interesting and original idea. A second is a copycat trying to glom off the success of that. I think I was surprised that many more than that would be produced.
Quite a few of them listed at The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club - Hunts for the General Public, some of them never solved. I certainly remember that an inordinate amount of time was spent in our house fruitlessly trying to crack the Cadbury’s Creme Egg Conundrum.
The generic name for such things now is an Armchair Treasure Hunt. They’re still around but apparently aren’t too common (outside of England anyway).
Back in the 80s there was a module published for the Fantasy Trip RPG called “Treasure of the Silver Dragon” which contained hidden clues to a real dragon statuette made of silver, that IIRC was solved in less than a week. There was a later module titled “Quest for the Unicorn Gold” which also supposedly contained clues to a real gold unicorn somewhere that was never found, leading many to speculate that the publisher never actually hid the unicorn (and that it may never have even existed in the first place).
Atari got into the act with a series of four contests associated with 2600 video game cartridges. I think one of them was Adventure. Solve something related to the game and win some ridiculous prize, like a real jewel-encrusted crown or a gold sword. We had one of the games but I never bothered trying to solve that aspect of it.
The Swordquest series: Waterworld, Fireworld, Earthworld and Airworld.
IIRC, the series tanked so badly that Airworld was never even released. I know I had Fireworld and Earthworld, and LORD was this a boring game. Even worse than E.T.