Category: Treasure Hunts

The Clock Without a Face by Gus Twintig (a pseudonym for Scott Teplin, Mac Barnett and Eli Horowitz) is an unusual armchair treasure hunt book, though its peculiarities are also a source of annoyance if you want to solve it all from the comfort of your living room.

Immediately catching the eye with its strangely pentagonal shape, this chunky board book is stuffed with amusing, colourful pictures. Each page shows a different floor from a 13 storey apartment block. The building’s residents have their different quirks, from the hoarder with her piles of toasters and cupboards of nuclear missiles, to the mime with his minimalist black and white decor and a secret, grimy “speaking room”.
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For a treasure hunt book with such a long title, the publisher provided a surprisingly short time to solve it. The Great Global Treasure Hunt on Google Earth by Tim Dedopulos was published in September 2011 and the competition to win €50,000 closed in March 2012.

There were nevertheless 77 correct entries received with the winner chosen at random.

After that, the publisher quickly lost interest. A series of videos were recorded by the author revealing clues to the solution on each page of the book, but only the first six were posted to YouTube. Perhaps the escalating obscurity of the solutions started to grate because, I’m sorry to say, this is a treasure hunt that infuriates rather than intrigues. Where did such a great idea go wrong?

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