For some reason this reminds me of the Eternity II puzzle[1]. The creator of the puzzle had mathematicians confirm how difficult it would be to solve due to the number of permutations and yet a vast number of people bought it thinking they would be the ones to solve it (usually by hand)! There was a $2 million prize and it was never solved.
Yeah, the original Eternity puzzle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle) was a lot better in that regard - it spiked a whole online community focused on finding clever ways to find a solution, and was in fact solved within a year.
Weird, as far as I can tell the website here is looking at understanding references in the text. For example the poems round the images on page 2 are "one of six of eight" which might refer to Henry VIII's wives.
Yet in the public domain the solution is known - a brief google lead me to "draw a line from left eye to left foot and extend to a letter, the letters forming an anagram of the location.
Kit Williams is highly collectable in darkest Gloucestershire. The thing is that you have to know him, have his work already and know him to be allowed to buy his work.
Game designer Brian Moriarty's 2002 Game Developers Conference talk discusses Masquerade quite a bit and I think does a good job of viscerally conveying its appeal. The text of the talk is here: http://ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html , but I think it's worth listening to the original recording, which you can get here: http://number-none.com/blow/media/psalm_46.mp3
The human brain has mastered pretty much one skill -- pattern recognition -- and it will apply this skill wherever it can, finding answers even where none exist.
I owned a translation of this book as a kid and had no luck (there was no way of knowing, pre-Internet, that the riddle had already been solved). Many years later I got the 1982 paperback English edition, which contained the solution as described by the author. It turns out that the crucial clue had been mangled by the translators.
If anyone wants to do something like this but a bit less quixotic, and you live in Boston, try the annual MIT Mystery Hunt! It only takes a weekend, and it's in January, so there's not long to wait. Just don't do it alone. Either form a team or contact them and get assigned to one. It's a great time!
This reminds me of the treasure supposedly hidden in the American Southwest by Forrest Fenn. He says it's still out there and has not yet been found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure
Hmm, I think this clue is new since I last read about this: In January 2015, Fenn revealed in a new interview: "I know the treasure chest is wet." Maybe this means he recently visited the treasure site? Maybe it's worth it to surveil him in case he goes again.
See also The Ultimate Alphabet which I pored over for years as a teenager - e.g. this is "S" which apparently has 1234 words illustrated (the complete book had 7777 total) - http://www.codex99.com/illustration/56.html
It came with a £10,000 prize for the best effort but I can't find any info about the winner.
"MW: Again, I can’t recall who won. Interestingly the winner was the one who identified the least number of false words. I think there was some scoring system where an incorrectly identified word attracted a minus penalty. I seem to remember that the contest was expanded with the paperback edition to include extra prizes for a younger age group."
According to Wikipedia, Williams would have accepted remote answers to the puzzle too:
"To ensure that readers from further afield had an equal chance of winning, Williams also announced that he would confirm the first precisely correct answer sent to him by post."
It reminds me of the modern Web you look at a news article see something you don't understand maybe a word so you search for the word, then that leads to the etymology of it and ten hours later you're still going into the rabbit hole.
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_II_puzzle