John Farndon: 'Do Not Open'

Enter a world of secret histories, unsolved mysteries, missing royalty, strange coincidences and cryptic messages. If you enjoy solving mysteries with the detectives, examining the evidence like a CSI, or reading choose-your-own adventure or 5-minute-mystery novels, this is your book.

The best way to read is by opening to the middle and allowing your interests to guide you. Pages are linked thematically, with similar topics suggested in the lower right corners, so you can skip through the book in multiple ways. It’s sort of like clicking web pages.

Each two-page or four-page vignette reveals the known information and challenges the readers to draw their own conclusions. It works because it doesn’t present topics as facts, set in stone, but as theories, which change. What was the purpose of the 55 square meter line drawings made in the North American earth 2000 years ago? Discovered by modern pilots, they couldn’t have been visible to the tribes that made them unless they had some sort of hot air balloons. For more unsolved mysteries, what happened to the Russian princess Anastasia, and her younger brother? Popular legends suggest she escaped the violent end of the rest of her family. When the czar’s burial place was dug up, two child skeletons were indeed missing. And this is only the beginning...

These theories are controversial, incomplete, and intriguing. Searching for buried treasures on a grid-like treasure map is a fun exercise in paper orienteering and an interesting survey of famous unaccounted for treasures, such as the looted Chinese gold buried by General Yamashita at the ending of World War II. He was executed for war crimes before revealing the gold’s location, and the hunt for it continues today. Do Not Open is aptly named, because once you open and start reading, it’s nearly impossible to put down.

Published 25th October 2007 by DK.

Written by W. L. Clark.