Some of the envelopes were a bit difficult to solve and I didn't get the whole sentence but it was still a fun time. ( )

This is such a fun puzzle! There's a little bit of a story, about a man whose hid a message from his ancestor in a bunch of documents and left obscure clues for the reader to decipher if they want to discover the message.

I enjoy Bantock's epistolary Griffin & Sabine books and one of their features is that there are envelopes with letters you can pull out and read. That's my favorite part, naturally. I was excited to find this book is comprised almost entirely of 16 envelopes, each with their own insert. There's all sorts of cool art to look at, with the answer to the clues hidden within.

Pro tip: get yourself a notebook or some scrap paper to help work through the clues. A few were fairly obvious to me, but several of them I had to break down, or use notes to eliminate characters or numbers or something. Some of the clues were really challenging!

There's no answer key in the book by the way - in the back, there is a note for how many letters each word of the clue contains, and then what the final order is in (ie: clue 1 doesn't equal word 1.) After I thought I solved the puzzle, I wrote it out and discovered I had 3 words wrong. Hahah. A couple I figured out by context clues, but the last I needed to revisit the envelope and figure out where the hell I went wrong.

If you like word and visual puzzles and cool art and interactive books, then I highly recommend this one! ( )

Had Bantock's puzzles been any more difficult, most likely I would not have been motivated to seriously attempt solving them. And yet, simple enough for me to engage with them, and I find myself unimpressed with the difficulty. I acknowledge my interest in such books as these is misleading: I'm not really the right reader for this.

That said, no puzzle was solved simply by flipping to a page and looking, though the solution could have been reached faster if I'd done all in one go. Instead, I chose to pull out one or two pages from their envelopes at a sitting, leisurely review the art as well as the puzzle, and keep notes. Typically I completed one or two sessions in a week.

Unavoidable comparison to Kit Williams's 1983 book Masquerade but simpler and the payoff is in the book itself (not in finding a treasure buried in the world outside the book).

I made an effort to decipher the encoded message before applying the key provided, leading me to a summary of the Manifesto of the Enragés (1793). That was not the correct solution, but I appreciate the puzzle introduced me to an historical event. The solution itself was satisfying enough, perhaps even more substantive than anticipated. ( )

Last night I finally solved the last puzzles of Dubious Documents, and I have mixed feelings. I'm proud that I completed it, but often I felt like I solved them with sheer stubbornness rather than ingenuity. Like others said, you really can't "solve" the puzzles without the clues. And the clues aren't riddles so much as stupidly obscurant instructions. The puzzle isn't in the pictures, but in how to interpret the positively Hegelian directions. The art is of course beautiful, though I enjoyed it less as I was trying to solve the puzzles. Ultimately I felt most let down by the final hidden message. It just didn't seem worth the trouble. ( )

Every Nick Bantock book is a keeper. I have collected them all just for their beauty and uniqueness. This latest one is a puzzle (which i still have not being able to solve) but nevertheless it is another one of those delightful treasure troves of somebody else's mail which you are dying to open. ( )