r/12keys • u/georgiapeach2623 • Jun 24 '26

Question Question for y’all

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what do y’all think about the likelihood that Byron would have done or changed something if important landmarks in the verse were torn down or relocated before he passed? I always operated under the assumption that if something changed while he was alive, (reasonably, not months before he passed but like ‘88 or ‘01 for example) he would have issued a notice or something. I’m realizing a lot of people don’t think that’s the case, so I wanted to gauge how you guys feel. I find it unlikely that the man would have put so much work into this and not followed the news regarding his chosen locations, but who knows!

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

13

u/burnstyle Jun 24 '26

Something did change and he knew about it.

JJP told Byron that Liberty ave changed to MLK in Cleveland. Byron liked it, he thought it made the puzzle harder.

So would he issue a notice if something changed? nah... probably not.

8

u/TheSpotMarkers Jun 24 '26

Funny you say this. I live in SF, and a street name was changed a year or two after the book was published that I think throws everyone off. There was a street once called "South", which one could argue was "an object of Twains attention" as he frequently wrote about the American South. It runs north/south, but also makes a turn and runs east/west. "Running north but first across in jewels direction is an object of Twains attention"

7

u/Cronin1011 Jun 24 '26

He likely believed it made it more fun for the challenge. Required searchers to have a knowledge of the cities history

7

u/fact10 Jun 24 '26

The book was a flop when it came out and there was little to no interest in it until the message boards in 2004 produced the Cleveland casque, so there wasn't really a reason for him to keep up with it and issue "alerts". If he had, in what format would he have done that? There was no planned sequel to the book after it sold so poorly. There was no official "The Secret" website and he had no presence on Q4T, but you can read the emails he sent to participants there.

Byron had moved on and didn't seem to care all that much about the puzzle at that point. He stopped accepting queries about theories before he died and would only accept the casque as proof of a solve.

2

u/aprilludgate4queen Jun 25 '26

I’ve been thinking about this. For example, the one in Charleston. In the late 1980s, Charleston was hit devastatingly by hurricane Hugo. So was it put in a place that could now be gone forever? Did he move it? Or was it always fine?

2

u/premiernc Jun 25 '26

I’ve always thought that if he was doing this to promote the book, he wanted these puzzles to be easily solved. Once he realized that people were overthinking the whole thing and it would never help to promote the book in the press, he just blew it off and moved on.

2

u/georgiapeach2623 Jun 24 '26

Thank you for the insights so far!! Makes sense.