S.earch Book 5

*** Update *** The 5th book has been found !

It was indeed in a Little Free Library cabinet and @enaxor tweeted the picture of it.

The LFL box was located between SE Kelly St & SE Tibbitts St on 31st Avenue, the clues pointed to an area between Franklyn St and Brooklyn St, and East of SE 28th Ave, West of SE 33rd Ave, which I have tried to show on this map.

The hunt has started.

This quote we have seen Doug Dorst tweet before, The Who Is Straka blog has an article that mentions it's first appearance.

Clue 2

Possibly referring to Powells City Of Books

Clue 3

Possibly leading to Bushell & Peck Bakeshop

Also possibly Mose code for SE ? - Confirmed

Clue 4

Secret for a Nightingale book by Victoria Holt

Catherine Called Birdy book by Karen Cushmen

Fresh Ways with Poultry - Anonymous author ?

Refers to the books in the LFL cabinet where S. was located

Clue 5

C Notes refers to Franklyn i.e. anything above (North of) Franklyn St.

Nets refers to the Brooklyn Nets team, and means anything below (South of) Brooklyn St.

Between walls means between the two Avenues, which are described by the next two clues.

Clue 6

Book of Job CHAPTER 28

Refers to 28th Avenue

Clue 7

Book of Daniel Chapter 8 VERSE 33

Refers to 33rd Avenue

Clue 8

Simple the word "Little" as part of the Little Free Libraries location

Clue 9

A Free album cover

Second part of the Little Free Libraries location

Clue 10

Probably referencing Little Free Library - confirmed

S.earch Book 4

*** UPDATE *** Book 4 has been found by Jo Garfein

These are the clues for book 4 which is located in San Francisco.

To our knowledge this book has not been found yet so there may be time to decode and still find the hidden book.

In true Straka code style the numbers relate to the page / word that we need in his own book "Alive in Necropolis" that is mentioned in the first tweet relating to this hunt. @MJHASOWLEYES and @ObFuSc8 have partialy decode this to -

____ ____ CROSS STREET ____ ____ ____ SEVENTY NINE BOOKS ____

However they don't have the actual book, so can't find the results online and can't fill in some of the missing words, so if you have the actual book please let us know.

*** UPDATE *** - I missed a post by @ObFuSc8 and the clues were solved, quite different to the partial decoding above with the real book the final solution is -

Two Sisters Bar and Books 579 Hayes St, Middle Shelf

S.earch Book 3

I was out and about during this search, but I did my bit while sitting in a pub in England, directing a Scotsman and a local lady to a location in LA !

The book was found by Paul and Alice, and yes Paul is the same person that found the first book !

The clues were all pictures this time, and I have posted them all below, when we examined them all they turned out to be all names of board games of one sort or another.

That pointed us at Game Haus Cafe in LA where the book was found in the Mystery Express board game box.

S.earch Book 2

*** UPDATE *** After a lot of headscratching and pondering book 2 was found by Joseph Tavano

I have updated the clue information below to show how I think it's location was worked out.

We are off again, this time the search area is Boston.

@MyTheseus has suggested that this might point to the City of Squares in Boston otherwise known as Cambridge

Second clue

Third clue.

Picture of Blaise de Vigenère which leads us to the Vigenère cipher to decode the letters in the second clue, using Monkey as the keyword gives us - "Home of the engineers"

Clue four

Possibly relating to Wavy Gravy the Hippie Clown

If you rake WAVY GRAVY and reverse it it to GRAVY WAVY, spend the two 5's i.e. remove the roman numeral number 5 (V's) from the name you get GRAY WAY which is a street on the MIT campus.

The L. in this clue refers to building 50 (Roman numeral again).

So looking at the map above the building is the Walker Memorial building.

Possibly relating to the Castor Genus of Beaver, as the Engineers team mascot is Tim the Beaver

Confirmed, just inside the building is a mosaic of Tim the Beaver.

A poem by Ogden Nash

The full poem is -

A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

The book was hidden in an old Flue just inside the building.

S.earch Book 1

*** Update *** We have a winner !

Purely by chance a good friend of SFiles22, and a big S. Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams fan, happened to be in New York when the first clues were posted, collectively we managed to steer him in the right direction and after overcoming a little issue that the venue with the book in was closed Paul found the book !

Paul tweeted a couple of pictures of the location and the book and was able to walk away with his prize, he has said that he will donate the prize to the next Cancer Gets LOST auction, so look out for it then.

I have updated the clue descriptions below to give more information on their meanings

Already we have our first clue for a book in New York City.

Anyone think they know where it is get in touch in the comments or via Twitter

This clue is a map of a part of Brooklyn.

Second clue

This pointed us to a possible location on or near water, and obviously a bar of some description.

Third clue.

This is a picture of Frederick Exley he is an American author, who happened to have a bar named after him in Brooklyn that is located on the first clue map (Google Map) the location is near the Williamsburg Bridge and East river

Maybe a reflection of the location that S. first washes up on shore in Straka's last work.

Let the S.earch begin!

Just when you thought it was safe to relax for the holidays a new challenge arrives.

Watch the video below and then let us know what you think in the comments.

Doug Dorst - Kansas City Library 8th May

The Kansas City Library are hosting an event with Doug Dorst.

It will be a conversation with Kaite Stover, the Library's director of readers' services.

The event will be available via YouTube for everyone to watch and starts at 6:30pm(CST).

You can follow the Kansas City Library (@KCLibrary) and Katie Stover (@MarianLiberr) on twitter for more updates and to see some of the questions people have already sent in for this event.

** Update **

Now the event has taken place, the full video is available to watch again, have a look at around the 58 minute mark and we get a little mention :-)

Vulture Interviews doug Dorst

Just published is a new interview with Doug Dorst on the Vulture Website, conducted by Jennifer Vineyard

There are some pretty cool questions and in depth answers, although not necessarily revealing any answers to mysteries in the book !

Mckay's Magazine Review Ship Of Theseus

A short while ago Doug Dorst tweeted these pages from McKay's Magazine.

They contain pages from a review of Ship of Theseus and are from February 1950.

A brief scan of the review shows that the reviewer is not exactly a fan of the book - "a vulgar ouroboros of a novel, filled to bursting with apathy, anomie, and omphaloskepsis." (Yes I did look that last one up !)

The second page has some adverts and other articles and I am going to work my way through them to see if there are any further clues in them. This post will be updated if any new information comes to light, please let us know in the comments, via twitter or email if you think there is anything new in the article or other material.

This is great news for fans of S. as it means to me that there are other things to come, whether this is a gentle push to get us to look further or just part of a planned activity I don't know, but interesting never the less.

Update 1 - I just realized Edsel B Grimshaw, and this review, is referenced on the Eotvos Wheel Website, on the candidates page

@ObFuSc8 also reminded me that this is mentioned in the book - "Chap7 IIRC along with the obituary). Magazine owned by Bouchard/ARP."

Lady Lobster also points out that it is mentioned on page 106 in Eric's margin note.

Update 2 - The WhoIsStraka Wordpress blog has a transcription of the review.

Update 3 - There was a lot of discussion yesterday about the contents of the review and the adverts, I have collated most of it in a Storify list

I think the main points are -

From one of the adverts an address could be the New York Public Library and a search reveals it has books by Václav Straka - (Link from @CFish6) Does anyone live near the library that could call in and take a look at the books to see if anything is hidden within ?

@ObFuSc8 has posted a list of references used for the adverts in the comments below.

@MyTheseus mentioned the "magic burgoo" mentioned in the review and wondered if this points to anything within the book, a search for links and references was started.

@MyTheseus also said "Review mentions 450 pages in SOT, but there are 456. Six pages missing…" - So does than mean the original version of SoT has been extended for our benefit ?

Doug Dorst and J J Abrams in New York

If you were following the conversation on Twitter yesterday you will have read all the fun that Mr Dorst and Mr Abrams were having in New York.

I will try and sum up some of that information and point you to where you can see more of the events.

First of all J J Abrams was at the NYC Soho Apple store, he was doing a live chat and this was also being relayed via twitter by @iBooks and @Bad_Robot

I have created a Storify version of the chat for you to read if you want to. Not related to the chat but interesting for us, while I was over at Storify I noticed there was a page for Radio Straka created by Anna Frame.

Anyway back to the book chat, most of the questions were the usual things people ask about the book and it's creation, but at the end there was something quite interesting for us.

@AmandaKennedyuk, who is a follower of this blog, asked a question about whether there is something major we have yet to uncover. The response was first that there are quite a lot of things hidden online, but then this clue was given - "TEN". In typical J J Abrams style nothing is easy ! Does this mean there are 10 websites, we have to solve something big in chapter 10 (have we already solved that ?), is this a reference to the roman numeral X ? Answers on a postcard from Brazil please, or in the comments if yow want.

So now on to the next part of the event, where the picture at the top of this post comes from courtesy of Paul (@TK10815) who was at the event.

I haven't got much detail yet from this part of the event, but Paul did take a short snippet of video which is on Instagram. He also mentioned that the full chat will be online at some point on the iTunes Meet The Author pages.

As soon as that is available we will update this post and send the information on twitter.

*** Update *** This is now live.

As you can see from the picture Paul got to meet Doug Dorst and have a photo taken with him. Paul said this after the event - "Thanks for being a gentleman and a scholar, @dougdorst, for answering (&avoiding) my questions after the NYC Apple chat tonight"

Paul also said on his Instagram page for this picture that "Doug then thanked everyone at SFiles22 for their passion and commitment. He's well aware of the blog and what is being posted there :)"

So I think it is appropriate to say Hello Mr Dorst, we really appreciate your work on the enigma that is S. and are still puzzling away at the mysteries.

Doug Dorst Book Signing Event in Austin

Details of another S. book signing have been released.

Doug Dorst will be signing copies in Austin Texas on the 9th of December.

See the Book People website for more details

Friday Catchup

First of all we have a possible / probable solution to the footnote code in chapter 10 of the book.

In the comments "The Fourth" gave a solution, followed up by some extra info from ObFuSc8.

As this is something in the book that isn't explicit in the book I will put it in spoiler tags just below in case you don't want to read about it just yet.

Click here to see the possible answer

In the first footnote for Chapter 10 the words "Spinning Wheel" and "locate" are in italics, so this points us straight at the Eotvos wheel contained in the book.

If you work out the locations referenced from the footnotes and write down the 5 letter codes in a grid you get a message -

Which if you read left to right top to bottom is

I HAVE LOVED YOU FROM THE BEGINNING. I WILL LOVE YOU TO THE END.

There is still the question of the location of the 6th column, as the footnote mentions Calais but the coordinates for Calais France do not match the code necessary to make the whole string work fully - L O N L E



The list of locations is -

1 - Bergan, Norway - 60N, 5E - I Y B W U
2 - Biabou, St. Vincent - 13 N, 61 W - HOEIT
3 - Portland, Or - 45 N, 123 W - AUGLO
4 - Thunkar, Bhutan - 27 N, 91 E - VFILT
5 - Santiago, Spain - 33 S, 70 W - ERNLH
6 - Calais, France - 51 N, 0 E - XBTUP (??)
7 - Morondava, Madagascar - 20 S, 44 E - OMIVE
8 - Havana, Cuba - 23 N, 82 W - VTNEN
9 - Sofia, Bulgaria - 42.70 N, 23.33 E (approx) - E H G Y D
10 - New York City - 44 N, 73 W - DEIO*

You can see the discussion on the Eotvos wheel code page, Click here to see the first comment and then scroll down slightly to see the post by ObFuSc8

Next, not really book related, Mr Toasty has kindly set up an IRC room for us to chat in about S if we want to - Straka IRC

Then we had an interesting tweet from @sFileSerin, who said if you look at this website for UViRCO Technologies, the name Vaclav Straka and CORIOLIS General Trading is mentioned.

I'm sure it is a complete coincidence, but fun never the less.

Finally for now is this article from the San Marcos Mercury

It interviews Doug Dorst and talks about the secrecy behind the books creation.