Style
Written in rhyme, the book includes large and lavish full-page illustrations of Horace's opulent house and the events of the party, packed with hidden details. The author invites the reader to deduce the identity of the thief by examining the illustrations and making deductions and observations. Also among the details in the illustrations are hidden messages, ciphers, and codes for amateur cryptographers (for example, one page's border consists of Morse code while another page set in the ballroom contains musical clues as to which guest is guilty). The biggest and most noticeable clue lies in a paragraph of ciphertext at the end of the book, which is to be decrypted, once the reader has discovered the identity of the thief, by means of a Caesar cipher mapping A to the first letter of the guilty animal's name. The solution to the cipher confirms the answer to the puzzle and offers an additional challenge to the reader.
The final portion of the book contains the answers to almost all of the clues in the book (including the cipher), and how to solve them. These last pages are sealed together, as the reader is encouraged to try to solve the puzzles themselves first. This sealed section was absent from earlier prints of the book - but was available by mail.
Read more about this topic: The Eleventh Hour (book)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
—John Fiske (b. 1939)
“It is the style of idealism to console itself for the loss of something old with the ability to gape at something new.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)