The previous year, author and publisher Byron Preiss had traveled to 12 locations in the continental U.S. (and possibly Canada) to secretly bury a dozen ceramic casques. Each casque contained a small key that could be redeemed for one of 12 jewels Preiss kept in a safe deposit box in New York. The key to finding each casque was to match one of the paintings in the book to one of the verses in the book, solve the resulting riddle, and start digging. Since 1982, only two of the twelve casques have been recovered. The first was located in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1983 by a group of students. The second was unearthed in 2004 in Cleveland by two members of the Quest4Treasure forum. Preiss was killed in an auto accident in the summer of 2005, but the hunt for his casques continues. A few other bits of wisdom about the treasure spots are well worth keeping in mind: 
 
 Preiss was obviously a responsible citizen and he wouldn't have wanted his treasure hunt to cause any harm or do any damage. On Friday, I leave for Chicago to interview the Goonies who found the treasure there, back in 1984. My first call was to Preiss’s widow and what she said got my heart racing again, the way I felt when I first saw that book in the Bedford library so many years ago.
– In the early 1980s, Byron Preiss buried 12 keys underground in North America that, when found, can be turned in for gems worth $1,000 each. He and a number of collaborators created a book called The Secret: A Treasure Hunt!, published in 1982, that contains a dozen paintings and poems, each of which leads the way to the location of one key—as long as the finder is willing to dig three feet and unearth one of the ceramic casques that holds each key. Preiss was inspired by a wildly popular book with the same idea, Masquerade, that was published in the UK in 1979—but The Secret wasn't nearly so popular, the clues are difficult, and just two keys have been found in the ensuing 32 years. Preiss, the only person who knew exactly where the keys are buried, died in 2005. But thanks to the book's resurgence on the Internet, James Renner is determined to unearth one of the keys, almost 30 years after he first became enchanted with the book as an 8-year-old boy at an Ohio library, he writes in Boing Boing. A Reddit post introduced the book to a new generation of treasure seekers late last year, and it includes links to all sorts of resources, including a comprehensive wiki about the book, high-resolution digital versions of the paintings, a map of the presumed locations of the keys, and much, much more. Or you can do things the hard way, buy the Amazon Kindle version of the book yourself, and try to decode it. As for the two keys found so far, the first was dug up by three kids in Chicago in 1984, and the second was found by two lawyers in Cleveland in 2004. The rest are still up for grabs—and, Preiss' widow confirms to Renner, the gems are, too, so anyone who finds a key will be rewarded. Renner is set to interview the three kids from 1984 and then travel to various locations to search for more keys—all with a documentary crew in tow to film the hunt. (Click to read about seven more lost treasures you can search for.)