Armchair Treasure Hunt 1986
| Title: | Armchair Treasure Hunt 1986 |
| Setters: | Paul Coombs & Brian Jackson |
| Themes: | Magic |
Some Notes on the Hunt
Paul Coombs writes...
Brian Jackson now realised that the ATH was the ideal vehicle for showing his artistic talents to the world, so we made an early start on the 1986 hunt in order to allow him time to create some illustrations. I let him have a free rein, so long as he left some spaces for the questions and the imaginary journey. His artwork for the hunt was spotted by Logica founder Philip Hughes, which led to him illustrating some Logica publicity material.
Typing replaced the Letraset. It is interesting to see how the subsequent growth of word processing and then graphics technology has been reflected in Hunts over the years. I had also realised that good questions were important, and from then to now I have constantly been on the lookout for the trivia that makes an interesting ATH question. We could now hide clues in the illustrations, as the answers to this hunt make clear.
This hunt marked the first appearance of a red herring, with clear references to a village called Golden Pot. In fact I had chosen Northaw, where I had occasionally visited in my student days.
Brian Jackson writes...
"Magic" was one of the two most artistically satisfying hunts and so a favourite. The reason there are a lot of cats is that I always prefaced ATH with Christmas, and it has always been the CAT Hunt to me (and my diary). It was a bit of a squeeze getting some of the questions onto the pictures (Artist to Writer: "Well, couldn't you just use shorter words????") but had some nice effects. It was also worth it just for the look on the LSSC committee's faces when they were questioning whether to put up the prize money that year and we produced the nearly finished artwork.