Talk Like a Pirate Day Treasure Hunt 2017

The Treasure Hunt has ended! Our prize-winners have been chosen and profile badges (the highly sought-after swashbuckler's stash) are coming next week to everyone who found at least one treasure. I'm working on getting everyone who found at least six treasures upgraded to lifetime memberships today.

In the meantime, here are our clue solutions and some stats:

502 scallywags found 2 or more treasures
318 found 12 or more

Treasure 1 (310 found)
Diabolic book dealer,
Cloud computer, buccaneer,
Child-lover, child-eater,
Chocolat nibbler, chocolate dealer.

Treasure 2 (312 found)
Bearded author, often tweets,
Bicycles wrong on one way-streets.
Short-titled book of times long gone.
No mafia connections, but a don.

Treasure 3 (300 found)
This library of a Viking city
Has a hall that's rather pretty!
And tourists come and tourists wait
To glimpse its truly great Vulgate.

Treasure 4 (347 found)
"La la la" the piggies sing.
And from the sock-drawer B. B. King.
Essential author, here to stay.
It's quiet now. What do you say?

Treasure 5 (371 found)
Some swabs go in for history,
Or walk the plank "biology."
But I have hooked the field for me!
They call it __________.

Treasure 6 (415 found)
Ooooooooooh, if sunday night battles be something you wish
Yet upon your safe house you lack a satellite dish
Some might seek dark shoals for this popular show
Braving torrents and currents in search of HBO.
What has a plot that twists more than a dragon through air,
A crown and a kingdom played like musical chairs?
(Not each installment is the treasure ye seek,
But a hoard of tomes, enough for a week!)

Treasure 7 (357 found)
Made of sugar, time, and spices
Often served best over ices
Add me to liquid to raise the prices
Or yet alone my strength suffices.

Treasure 8 (425 found)
Abandon all hope, ye who seek to travel the sea
Far apart from the dregs of humanity
Fathoms and chasms of lonely blue waves
Wash over man’s abandonment and graves.
This tale speaks of one man’s woe
Nearly drowned off an island off Santiago.
Desolate maybe, as Defoe says,
One of many in the Isles Juan Fernandez.

Treasure 9 (1,294 found)
Sometimes a ship, when plowing the bluffs,
Lets loose the cannons before the blast.
Momentum is lost and sails often luff
In the roar of a falling mast.
Yet this duodenary tide doth swell up the breeze
And steer the ship right through the storm.
Grab some booty before it goes out to sea,
To best gather your mates and inform.

Treasure 10 (309 found)
What do you do with some drunken sailors?
What do you do with some drunken sailors?
What do you do with some drunken sailors
On LibraryThing.com?

Put 'em in the Tags until they’re sober
Put 'em in the Tags until they’re sober
Put 'em in the Tags until they’re sober
On LibraryThing.com.

Treasure 11 (418 found)
Sailing, sailing over the public domain
For many a stormy wind shall blow ere Jim comes home again!

Treasure 12 (329 found)
Row, row, row your boat,
This library’s afloat!
In days of old, it was Darwin’s hold:
Transporting the Legacy as he wrote.

Treasure 13 (357 found)
If you’ve a junior buccaneer in your midst,
They’ll enjoy this tale for tykes.
This tiny raider is also our narrator,
Singing sea chanteys whenever he likes.

Treasure 14 (392 found)
I found that diggin' fer buried treasure
ain't a pirate's life fer me,
sailin' with peg legs & parrots is
a romance, not reality.

If truth be what ye seek,
of non-fictional piracy,
these pages reveal everything
you'll find it all, "ac-Cordingly"

Treasure 15 (367 found)
Ye' can mash us with adventure, fiction and fantasy,
flag us with Stevenson, Crichton, and J.M. Barrie,
but if you want to find our name tag pinned to our chest,
try something other than rovers, freebooters, and the rest.

Treasure 16 (318 found)
The trade winds blow west, upon the San Francisco shore,
to bring your ships the best tackle ye can store.
To get there, a journey you must make,
South of Treasure Island, through the Golden Gate.

When you reach Mission Bay, shore up and travel west,
turn left at Valencia Street, your journey’s end is abreast.
If you reach Amnesia Beer & Music Hall, you’ve ventured just too far,
Turn around now to stock up on compasses, spyglasses & more.

WINNERS

A hearty congratulations to these adept sailors, who navigated the seas with ease and will have some LibraryThing treasure washing upon their home shores soon!

PadfootTheLibrarian, trlinatl, mamzel, JerryMmm, Kodibear, ReadSonja, katiekrug, geohistnut, btuckertx, Michael.Rimmer, Cretius, erinclark, astraplain, Marissa_Doyle, klile5ab, Nerilka, DanieXJ, joanalau, boblet, wpwhite

Yo ho ho and a bottle of Treasure #7!

Omg some of the ones I missed have such obvious solutions! *headdesks* I can't believe I missed 10... 7 I had the right word, just didn't think to look at the tag page.

Congrats to everyone!

Congratulations to all the winners. And a round of applause for all the LT staff's work putting this together again. So much fun, thank you.

I wonder how many people got #9 without meaning to just because they were checking this month's list :)

>4 Darth-Heather:

With the number of LTers solving it several times larger than the others, there's reason to think it.

But that can be a good thing: another way of letting LTers know of the hunt, and joining in if they choose to continue. I wonder how many of the participants got #9 as their first?

#9 is my favorite feature, but I could not figure out the answer for the longest time ... 😒

I thought 15 would have had more people finding it. That's my first find I think. Plus I found like three other answers by clicking on the first three books on that tag page. :)

Congrats to the winners, and thanks to LT! I look forward to next year. Of course, if you want to do it sooner, maybe we could have "Talk like a pilot day"?

You know, October 30 is "Talk Like Jane Austen" Day...just sayin'.

>4 Darth-Heather:

Probably quite a few. That one's been an answer at least once before, if not twice, and the same pattern happened then. I also remember at least one baffled question about the banner in the relevant group.

I have to admit to the problem I had finding the answer to No. 2. I am ashamed to say I had a sever case of gender bias that delayed me from choosing the answer that was right in front of me.
Bad, Mamzel, bad!

WoW, i win a 1 in 16 chance ... i never win anything!

Yay

>12 JerryMmm:

Love it!

>11 mamzel:

Don't feel bad. "Bearded" is a pretty strong misdirection in terms of gender for that one.

>14 lorax: Indeed.

>14 lorax: As was "don" though I did understand what they were referring to. Tricky!

>16 mamzel: I didn't get that clue either, and would have completely missed that treasure if I didn't have an inside view. Completely over my head!

I still cannot figure out why it took me so long to figure out #8 - apparently it was the easiest one for everyone else. I think that the moment I saw Defoe, my mind said - nope, too easy, don't go there.

>2 Heather19: #10 was tricking everyone (and as a result it has the lowest number of people getting it) - I kept telling people to stop overthinking it and just think as a child on that one :) So don't feel bad.

Congrats to the winners and to those who got all of them!

I got a bunch, but only because of the clues. I'm not sure if I would have figured any out without the clues!!!

>16 mamzel:

"Don" was the only part of the clue I felt I had for certain, but the CK search is sufficiently unhelpful that it didn't turn anything up. Lateral thinking "Okay, what are Tim's interests?" made that one click.

Found #9 first when I happened to check the month's list.

Then was hooked! Stayed up way too late to find all of them but had a lot of fun. :-)

Ahoy, me hearties!

I've confirmed with Tim that all buccaneers who found at least six treasures have had their accounts upgraded and all who found at least one treasure have been awarded their Looters Locker ( ) profile badge. You can see all your profile badges here.

Suppose I have to now paint three rocks with Pirate Chests/Booty/Lockers, so I can rebury my treasure. Arrr...