Byron Preiss buried twelve treasures across North America, but he took the map away.

Science · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: An innovative publisher who pioneered digital books and graphic novels, Byron Preiss also crafted a real-world treasure hunt. In 1982, he hid twelve keys in parks across the continent. When he died in a 2005 car accident, he remained the only person who knew the locations of the remaining nine.

Byron Preiss was a prolific publisher and packager who constantly pushed the boundaries of traditional media. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford, he founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications in 1974. Throughout his career, he championed emerging formats, becoming an early adopter of CD-ROMs and ebooks while producing a vast array of graphic novels, children's books, and illustrated works. His collaborations spanned from educational comics created with the Bank Street College of Education to high-profile projects featuring celebrities like Jane Goodall and Jerry Seinfeld.

His most enduring mystery, however, was The Secret. Published in 1982, the book featured twelve verses and twelve paintings by John Jude Palencar. Readers were tasked with deciphering the clues to locate twelve plexiglass boxes buried in various parks. Each box contained a key redeemable for a jewel valued at $1,000. Inspired by the British book Masquerade, Preiss’s puzzle never achieved the same level of public obsession, yet it persisted as a quiet, decades-long enigma for those who took up the challenge.

The hunt proved difficult. One box was discovered in Chicago in 1983, another in Cleveland in 2004, and a third in Boston in October 2019. Following Preiss's sudden death in a 2005 traffic accident on Long Island, the secrets to the remaining nine locations were effectively lost. His companies, Byron Preiss Visual Publications and ibooks Inc., filed for bankruptcy shortly after his passing, leaving the buried treasures to remain hidden in the landscape, likely known only to the man who placed them there.

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