I've been reading the book "Quest for the Golden Hare" by Bamber Gascoigne (1983) recently. It's about the book Masquerade, how the puzzle was devised, the people who wrote to the author, and the solution. Long out of print, but I love some of the quotes from it ... because the themes are uncannily similar to Kryptos. "Masquerade" was published on 20 September 1979, and the hint was in the Sunday Times on 21 December 1980. It was the hint that brought the book to the attention of the people who solved the riddle (Mike Barker and John Rousseau) and they'd solved it by November 1981. The heart of the puzzle ("Close by Ampthill") had been devised in February 1977. I would have to agree with you about wishing the creator of Kryptos would put equal effort into creating a clue. [page 2-3 ... Bamber Gascoigne was the only other person in the world who knew how the puzzle worked and where the hare was buried] Letters to me were invariably a last resort. Some came from bystanders, desperate because members of their family had changed before their eyes into unapproachable fanatics or were spending the housekeeping money on apparently insane journeys in quest of the treasure. Others were from the Masqueraders themselves, begging for a single word of encouragement to show that they were at least on the right track. I invariably wrote back saying that in my view the puzzle was far too difficult and advising them to give it up. ... Kit had explained to me the basis of his puzzle, but even with that privileged information I was unable to make it work out. The cause of my growing uneasiness was the thought that if it was in fact impossibly difficult, then I was the only person in the world in a position to form that opinion. Kit considered it very possible, even perhaps dangerously easy, because he had invented it. The publishers considered it possible because Kit had told them it was. But if my hunch was right, and if people all over the world were beating out their brains and emptying their pockets in pursuit of the unattainable, what should I do? Insert a notice in The Times to the effect that Masquerade was insoluble? I would not have been popular in 30 Bedford Square [home of Jonathan Cape]. Yet clearly the one passenger who believes that a train is hurtling off the rails has an obligation sooner or later to pull the communication cord. So it was pleasant indeed when, in spite of my forebodings, the train pulled neatly into the station. [page 141-142 ... this one is quite like the 38, 77, first 11 letters of K1 as a key for K4 idea. Perhaps this could have been a gentle way to explain to people who thought that was significant how contrived it sounded] ... But Neil [Parrack] also wanted the almost professional advice of his friend Tony Bennett, who works in intelligence at the Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, an establishment lately much in the news. Tony brought his family over at midday and soon proved himself as good as his reputation. He noticed on the map that a pylon was marked near Needlehole, and the sign for a pylon is an X in a square. Clearly this X was to mark the spot for the solution of Masquerade, itself an anagram of Made Square. It was all beginning to fit, and soon Tony had discovered even more exciting confirmation. Taking the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 from the Penny-Pockets square, and using the numbers in the same squares on the final page of the book, he came up with a sequence 10 46 4 7 5. By adding the 4 and the 6, he turned this into 10 10 4 7 5. He now told the astonished army of Parracks and Bennetts to turn back to the zodiac page, the one which had put them on to Gemini. He used his sequences of numbers to count through the letters on that page, starting at the end and going anti-clockwise. The last letter is G: 10 back from that gave E: another 10 came to M: 4 more to I: 7 to N: and the final 5 to I. Gemini again! It was indeed an astonishing coincidence. Numbers and letters intended for totally different purposes by Kit had quite logically turned up the very word already identified by the Parracks as the master clue. Moreover of all the twelve signs of the zodiac on that page, one only is partially obscured. The elbow of the sun man conceals half the sign of Gemini. The full symbol is II - two Is or two Eyes - so only one I is showing, and one Eye means Needlehole. ... [page 201-202] ... such was the fertile ground in which so many meaningless coincidences were discovered. That said, I have to confess finally to two Masquerade coincidences so improbable that even my own dispassionate explaining away of such oddities reels a little from the blow. They are in the two areas which I have described as being most suspect - number patterns and anagrams - but they do somewhat astonish even the professionally sceptical. The number pattern involves Kit's own initials. In using the Dürer magic square in the Penny-Pockets picture, he had to leave out one number to create a necessary space. He omitted the number 7 merely because it is the number most frequently singled out as special. This gave him an equivalent blank space in his final square of numbers (in the sand on the last page) and this seemed a natural place to sign his own initials. KW, which he had included somewhere in each painting. Beneath that final picture he had written `A Culmination', and it was later pointed out to him that his initials did culminate a number pattern quite unintended by Kit. In the Dürer square every quarter of numbers adds up to 34, so Kit's omission of 7 was apt in that 34 can be seen as 3 + 4, making 7. Equally apt was his insertion of his own initials in the other blank square, for K is the eleventh letter of the alphabet and W is the twenty-third. So KW = 11 + 23 = 34. But 34, as 3 + 4, brings us back to 7 which can also be expressed as 1 + 1 + 2 + 3. These digits provide 11 and 23, giving K and W in the alphabet, or Kit's initials, which is where we came in. A surprising culmination indeed. That number pattern is surprisingly neat, but most of us have no way of judging how surprising such neatness may be in the field of arithmetic. More immediately striking is the mysterious matter of the anagrams. Several Masqueraders noticed that Kit Williams is an anagram of `I will mask it', a fact of which Kit himself had been unaware but which caused him considerable amusement when it was pointed out. ... [finally, the man who found the physical hare, Dugald Thompson, had the pseudonym Ken Thomas, which is an anagram of "the mask on"; he'd called himself Ken and the publisher Tom Maschler had suggested Thomas] ---In Kryptos@yahoogroups.com, wrote : Another great example, and Rob will back me up on this one, is from the book Masquerade by Kit Williams. His puzzle was amazingly designed, but also very difficult, so difficult that after 20 years he put an equal amount of effort into a clue (something I wish Sanborn would do) to bring it to a solution: Here's the link to the wiki for that book for those interested. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book) This was the hint eventually released by the author. Jim