Byron Preiss

• 1. Introduction

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  Byron Preiss was buried with a secret that nine people are still trying to find. In 1982, he published a puzzle book called The Secret, hiding twelve plexiglass boxes across parks in North America. Each box held a ceramic container, and inside that container was a key. That key could be redeemed for a jewel worth $1,000. Preiss designed the clues himself, and when he died in July 2005, he was reportedly the only person who knew where the remaining nine boxes were. One had been found in Chicago in 1983. Another turned up in Cleveland in 2004. A third was discovered in Boston in October 2019. The other nine are still out there. That puzzle book is just one piece of a career that touched comics, children's literature, digital publishing, and celebrity memoir. Who was Byron Preiss, and how did a Brooklyn kid who once taught elementary school end up reshaping what a book could be?

• 2. Brooklyn to Stanford

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  Byron Preiss was born on the 11th of April 1953, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972, then earned a master's degree in communications from Stanford University. Even before finishing that graduate work, he was already making things. In 1971, while teaching at a Philadelphia elementary school, Preiss conceived an anti-drug comic book called The Block. He co-produced it with Jim Steranko, designing it specifically for low-level reading skills. Steranko's company, Supergraphics, published it and distributed it to schools across the country. It was a practical project aimed at real children in real classrooms, and it set the pattern for how Preiss would work: finding a problem, finding a collaborator, and finding a way to get the thing in front of an audience.

• 3. Building a Visual Universe

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  Preiss founded Byron Preiss Visual Publications in 1974, and its first major title was Weird Heroes, which debuted in 1975. The following year he launched the Fiction Illustrated series, a run of illustrated novels that brought together writers and visual artists in formats that did not quite fit the existing categories of comics or prose fiction. The first volume paired Preiss himself with Tom Sutton for Schlomo Raven: Public Detective. Stephen Fabian illustrated the second, Starfawn. Jim Steranko contributed Chandler: Red Tide. Ralph Reese drew the 1977 entry Son of Sherlock Holmes. In 1978 Preiss adapted Alfred Bester's novel The Stars My Destination as a two-volume graphic novel, with art by Howard Chaykin. Working as both a comics packager and a book packager, he also developed titles for publishers including HarperCollins and Random House. One collaboration with the Bank Street College of Education produced a series of educational comic books drawing on recognized genre authors, covering horror, fantasy, mystery, and science fiction.

• 4. Across the Children's Shelf

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  Preiss published children's books by an unusually wide range of well-known figures, including Billy Crystal, Jane Goodall, Jay Leno, LeAnn Rimes, and Jerry Seinfeld. He worked closely with illustrators Ralph Reese, William Stout, and Tom Sutton across multiple projects. His own children's novel, Dragonworld, was written with Michael Reaves and published by Doubleday in 1979, with eighty illustrations by Joseph Zucker. The book had originally been planned as the fifth title in the Fiction Illustrated series before it grew into something larger. Dragonworld proved durable: it appeared in multiple paperback editions through Bantam and Dell, then returned in paperback and ebook editions under his own ibooks imprint in the early 2000s. He also edited the audiobook recording of The Words of Gandhi, released by Caedmon in 1984 and narrated by Ben Kingsley. Kingsley won a Grammy Award in the category of Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording for that work.

• 5. The Puzzle That Outlived Him

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  The Secret, published in 1982, combined twelve short verses with twelve elaborate fantasy paintings by John Jude Palencar. Preiss drew his inspiration from Masquerade, a British puzzle book written and illustrated by Kit Williams and published in England in August 1979. Where Masquerade sparked what one account called a treasure hunting frenzy, The Secret generated a quieter following. Readers who matched the right verse to the right painting would receive clues pointing toward a buried location somewhere in North America. The physical prize at each site was a plexiglass box containing a ceramic container holding a key. That key, when brought to the publisher, could be exchanged for a jewel valued at $1,000. The Chicago box was recovered in 1983, within a year of the book's publication. Twenty-one years passed before the Cleveland box was found in 2004. The Boston box did not surface until October 2019, fourteen years after Preiss died. Since his death, the knowledge of where the remaining nine boxes are buried appears to have died with him.

• 6. Digital Frontiers

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  Preiss was recognized as a pioneer in digital publishing, counted among the first publishers to release books in CD-ROM format and as ebooks. His company ibooks Inc. brought Dragonworld back as a Microsoft Reader ebook in 2001, one concrete marker of how he moved his catalog into new formats. The broader ambition at ibooks was to treat emerging technologies not as novelties but as legitimate publishing channels. When both Byron Preiss Visual Publications and ibooks Inc. filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy on the 22nd of February 2006, it was less than seven months after his death. The filings traced a line between the man and the enterprises he had built: without Preiss, neither company could continue. His publishing list, spanning more than three decades, included work in graphic novels, illustrated fiction, children's books, interactive books, and anthologies covering subjects from dinosaurs to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

• 7. The Final Day

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  Byron Preiss died on the 9th of July 2005 in East Hampton, New York, on Long Island. He was turning left at an intersection onto Montauk Highway when his vehicle was struck by a Hampton Jitney bus traveling at or around 30 miles per hour (48.3 kilometers per hour). The airbag did not deploy. Preiss died almost instantly. He was survived by his wife, Sandi Mendelson, and their daughters Karah and Blaire. He was fifty-two years old. The nine buried boxes from The Secret remain scattered across North America, their locations known only to a man who can no longer give the answer.