Masquerade is a picture book, written and illustrated by the English artist Kit Williams, and published in the UK in September 1979 by Jonathan Cape. The book was a treasure hunt containing clues to the location of a hare made of gold and precious stones, fabricated and buried somewhere in Great Britain by Williams. The publishers anticipated a print run of 60,000 copies for the UK market, but the book became an unexpected international success. It eventually sold over a million copies worldwide, attracting treasure hunters from all over the world to come to Britain and search for the hare, and turned the previously little-known Williams into a celebrity.
In February 1982, Williams received a sketch of the location which he considered to be the correct answer, and Ken Thomas was declared the winner of the treasure hunt. However, the fact that Thomas had located the treasure without being able to solve the puzzle and his insistence on complete anonymity aroused suspicion. Two other people had solved the puzzle correctly, but had sent their answer to Williams too late.
In December 1988, a newspaper investigation discovered Thomas's true identity and revealed that he had obtained knowledge of the hare's location through his links to Williams' former girlfriend. In the same month, the hare was sold at auction to an anonymous overseas buyer. Its whereabouts remained a mystery for over twenty years until a BBC documentary in 2009 prompted the owner's family to identify themselves and briefly loan it back to the UK for a private exhibition of Williams' work, and again in 2012 for a longer period as part of a museum exhibition, the first time the hare had been put on public display. The hare was sold again at auction in November 2025. Masquerade is now recognised as the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
Background Kit Williams is a self-taught artist who had started painting in the late 1960s after serving in the Royal Navy. After seeing one of his works in a gallery in Liverpool, he was taken on by Lionel Levy and Eric Lister, owners of the Portal Gallery in London, which specialises in work by self-taught artists. Tom Maschler, then chairman of the publishing company Jonathan Cape, was a frequent visitor to the gallery, and saw one of Williams' exhibitions there. Fascinated by Williams' style, he asked the gallery if they could arrange a meeting with Williams, and in 1976 Lister and Maschler drove to Williams' home in rural Gloucestershire. Maschler asked Williams if he would be interested in creating a children's book, but to his disappointment Williams told him that he had no interest in doing so, as it would mean painting the same characters throughout the book, which he would find boring. As Maschler left at the end of the meeting, he said to Williams, "It's a pity about the book. You could have produced a book like no other. A book that would have caught the imagination of the world."
Williams was intrigued by Maschler's comment, and started to think about the type of book he could produce. He later told The New York Times, "I thought, 'How can I make people look at the paintings, look and look again?' And then I thought, 'If there is something actually hidden in them, it gives people an excuse to slip into them.'" Having then decided that the book would be some form of treasure hunt, he then resolved that the prize would be "something romantic, a modern-day Holy Grail":
Absolute purity was essential. I felt I was doing something for my own childhood, when the prizes on the backs of cereal packets turned out to be illusions. This had to be real gold and real gems, a jewel I conceived and made myself, and actually buried in the ground.
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.
With the idea for the puzzle book and its story in place, Williams called Maschler to tell him about his idea. Maschler invited him to the offices of Jonathan Cape in London, where Williams explained that he would need £3000 to buy the gold needed to create the treasure. Maschler agreed and drew up a contract.
Considering ideas for how to encode the solution to the puzzle within his book, Williams discounted crosswords and anagrams as too easy to solve. His solution was inspired by a mechanical model he had made, which he described as an "orrery". It consisted of a circular painting mounted on a spindle so that it could rotate, and around the edge of the painting was a border with letters that spelled out the phrase "dance three rings the songthrush sings add one a day to ensnare the hare". With everything now in place, Williams spent the following three years working on the paintings for the book, and wrote the story for Masquerade in a few weeks. As a tribute to Levy, Lister and Maschler, the names of all three men appear within the book's paintings. By 1979, he had finished the paintings and called Maschler again to tell him that everything was ready, delivering the individually wrapped paintings to Jonathan Cape's offices in London.Carey (2009). Event occurs at 20:11.
Manufacture and burial of the hare In his workshop in Gloucestershire, Williams used the 18-carat gold and precious stones that he had bought to craft a hare in the form of a large filigree pendant on a segmented chain. In order to work with such a large quantity of gold, Williams had to obtain a licence from the Bank of England. He described the creation of the hare in his introduction to the paperback version of Masquerade:
From one piece of gold I cut the outline of the hare, five and a half inches from nose to tail, then sawed out and drilled the filigree work within the body. The other piece of gold was enough to make the hare's legs, ears and tail, which I riveted to the body. Everything else – the bells and their tongues, the chains, the tiny animals – had to be made by melting down the remaining scraps of gold, beating them into coin shapes, then cutting them out. The stones I chose were a ruby for the hare's eye, turquoise in the flowers on the body and a large moonstone for the back of the moon. The faces of the sun and moon are made of faience, a substance the ancient Egyptians used a lot. I had to experiment for ages because the facial expressions changed so much as the faience cooled and hardened.
In 1980, The Sunday Times described the hare as containing seven ounces of gold, five turquoises, two citrines, and one ruby. Once the hare was finished, it was placed inside a ceramic, hare-shaped casket, also created by Williams in his workshop, which was then filled with wax and sealed. This was both to protect the prize from the soil and from damage from objects used by searchers to carry out their digging, 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".
Maschler realised that the burial of the hare would require a witness who was widely recognised as credible and trustworthy, in order to prevent accusations that Williams had not really buried it. His choice was the historian and writer Bamber Gascoigne, who was also well known to the general public as host of the long-running television quiz programme University Challenge.Carey (2009). Event occurs at 28:47. In addition, Gascoigne was already acquainted with the jewel and the forthcoming book – the photograph of the hare used on the book's back cover had been taken by his artist wife Christina at the Gascoignes' house in Richmond in London. During the night of 7–8 August 1979, Williams and Gascoigne drove to the chosen location in Williams' van, where Williams dug a hole at the burial spot to a depth of about 14 inches ("from the tip of my hand to my elbow"), and replaced the turf on top of it. The night was chosen specifically as the burial had to be carried out on a clear night under the light of the full moon, and without using torches to avoid attracting attention.
Publication and search The book was promoted in the Sunday newspaper The Observer four days before its publication, and the day before its publication it was the subject of a feature on BBC1's early evening current affairs programme Nationwide. The television documentary showed film of Williams fabricating the hare in his workshop and placing it inside its ceramic casket, along with footage of Williams driving off in his van in the dark and then supposedly returning after burying the jewel, announcing to the camera, "Now the hare's been buried... it's up to you to find it".
Williams announced publicly that his forthcoming book contained all the clues necessary to decode the treasure's precise location in Britain to "within a few inches". At the time, the only additional clue he provided was that the hare was buried on public property that could be easily accessed. To ensure that readers from outside the UK had an equal chance of winning, Williams also announced that he would confirm the first precisely correct answer sent to him by post.
The book went on sale on Thursday 20 September 1979. Jonathan Cape had printed an initial run of 60,000 copies, believing it would be a sufficient quantity to last until Christmas. However, to their surprise the book was an immediate runaway success – the initial run sold out in just three days, and Jonathan Cape had to print two more runs of 50,000 each within days.
Masquerade was published in France and in Germany in September 1980, followed by publication in the US on 3 October 1980 and then in Japan, where the book was called 仮面舞踏会 (Kamenbutoukai, meaning "masquerade ball" or "masked ball"). By the end of December 1980, Masquerade had sold more than 400,000 copies – 350,000 in the UK, Australia and South Africa combined, 30,000 in West Germany, 20,000 in Japan, and 10,000 in each of France, the Netherlands, Italy, and the USA. By October 1981, it had sold 400,000 copies in the UK and 360,000 copies in the US and had been translated into 11 languages. In the same month, Laker Airways began offering 10-day charter flights from the USA to the UK for Americans eager to search for the treasure. Masquerade eventually sold more than a million copies. A modified version of the book also appeared in Italian, with a treasure buried in Italy. It was reinvented and translated by Joan Arnold and Lilli Denon with the name Il tesoro di Masquerade, published by Emme Edizioni.
Searchers often dug up public and private property acting on hunches. A hill in England named Haresfield Beacon was a popular site for searchers, due to its name and its proximity to Williams' home. The hill was the property of the National Trust, and Williams paid £50 for the cost of a sign notifying searchers that the hare was not hidden on the premises. Real-life locations reproduced in the paintings were searched by treasure hunters, including Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire and the town of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire. In an interview in December 1980, Williams clarified that the hare was not buried on private property, and its location was not marked by any physical object.
Williams was receiving 100 letters per week at his cottage in Gloucestershire, and he had to open and check every one to check if any of them contained the correct answer. Gascoigne, having been asked by Williams to witness the burial of the hare and to document the contest from beginning to end, did so in his book Quest for the Golden Hare. Gascoigne summarised his experiences thus: