the fierce grey hours of the night

i hate insomnia.

i have nothing of much interest to say and probably shouldn't be posting an entry.

zoloft - this page has plenty of information about the solution to Treasure and also some other puzzle books. Did you know that Kit Williams was actually scammed out of the Masquerade prize and has tried to get it back (but hasn't been able to afford it) every time it's been auctioned since it was "won"? the people who found it didn't use the clues in the book; they were his exgf's then-current bf and a business partner, and they used personal information to find the golden rabbit jewel. They used it as security to set up some kind of software company. One of their products was a puzzle game where the winner would supposedly be awarded the jewel, but it never happened, and the company collapsed. The jewel has been auctioned at least twice since then. There were two guys who did follow the clues in the book to the correct solution, but since the solution said that you needed to dig at the spring equinox to find the exact position, they'd waited a few days too long, and the cheaters got to it first. I just found this stuff out the other day while I was researching.

Does anyone remember a book from the early 1990s that was... wider than it was tall, with a dark blue cover, and filled with paintings? I *think* each one may have been objects referring to a different letter of the alphabet (like an A painting, a B painting, etc). The paintings were heavily gessoed at the base and I think they might have been done with egg tempera or possibly oils. They were luminous and very detailed. One of the paintings was a treasure hunt where you could send in an answer, and I think later editions of the book came with a solution. The artist put his self-portrait in some (all?) of the paintings - I recall him as having short light brown hair and glasses. I also seem to recall one of the paintings being styled as a "junk shop" (with the artist as proprietor, maybe?) and another being styled as a 17th-century gallery (a room with walls full of paintings, and i think some of the paintings on the walls may have been miniature versions of some of the other pieces in the book). Does anyone know what I'm talking about? If I could remember the name of this thing, I would be much relieved.

(Ah! See later post - it's The [Annotated] Ultimate Alphabet by Mike Wilks.)

and on the topic of "armchair treasure hunts"...

and puzzle books, here's an online version of MAZE.

(the scans are so small, though, that it's hard to see anything.)

also, I think the book I was talking about in my last post may be The Ultimate Alphabet by Mike Wilks.

(Actually, it's The Annotated Ultimate Alphabet, which had the dark blue cover, as opposed to the grey cover on the original book.)