Masquerade is a children’s book, written and illustrated by Kit Williams

Kit Williams

Christopher 'Kit' Williams is an English artist, illustrator and author best known for his book Masquerade, a pictorial storybook which contains clues to the location of a golden jewelled hare created by Williams and then buried "somewhere in Britain."Williams wrote another puzzle book with a bee...

, which sparked a treasure hunt

Treasure hunt

A treasure hunt is one of many different types of games which can have one or more players who try to find hidden articles, locations or places by using a series of clues. This is a fictional activity; treasure hunting can also be a real life activity. Treasure hunt games may be an indoor or...

 by concealing clues to the location of a jewelled golden hare

Hare

Hares and jackrabbits are leporids belonging to the genus Lepus. Hares less than one year old are called leverets. Four species commonly known as types of hare are classified outside of Lepus: the hispid hare , and three species known as red rock hares .Hares are very fast-moving...

, created and hidden somewhere in Britain

Great Britain

Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 by Williams. It became the inspiration for a genre of books known today as armchair treasure hunts.
Challenged by Tom Maschler

Tom Maschler

Tom Maschler is a British publisher and writer. The son of Austrian Jews, he was five when his family fled the Nazis in Vienna and brought him to England...

, of the British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 publishing

Publishing

Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of literature or information—the activity of making information available to the general public...

 firm Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

, to "do something no one has ever done before" with a children's book, Williams set out in the 1970s to create a book of paintings that readers would study carefully rather than flip through and discard.