Pretty sure the red herrings in this puzzle were the most efficacious — we had quite a few searchers tell us that they’d solved this one in minutes, and a few who told us the hunt would be over just hours from the launch because this was so easy. 🙂
We hope those of you who arrived at the correct solution found it even more gratifying after taking a pit stop at the distraction!
The image is a bunch of books on a shelf at The Maker Spot in the North Richland Hills Public Library. Scanning the first letters of the authors’ names, you get a clear message: “Spend a long weekend at lovely Lake Brownwood.” However, there are plenty of books remaining, and the authors’ names on those spell out, “I love the Santa Rosa Blue Hole.”
Okay, great. Both Lake Brownwood and the Santa Rosa Blue Hole are within the boundaries of the search. But how do you use them? It’s hard to find a single, definitive GPS point for each.
Instead, look at the book groupings. The top row consists of three books, then a gap, five books, a gap, a single book, another gap, and six books. The number of books in each group is a digit in your (very precise) GPS coordinates.
Put them together and you get 35.166944, -103.733611. If you forget the negative sign for “west,” your point will be somewhere in China, which should be a strong hint that something’s amiss.
And that’s it! Your second point in The Big Picture is somewhere near Tucumcari, New Mexico.
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Solution to Puzzle 2: Bibliophiles
