Customer Reviews

The Gold-Bug

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

When the narrator of this story receives a plea from a man he knows to come visit him quickly, he leaves immediately. A strange mania seems to have befallen the poor man, and he sets off on a strange mission. But, when the man digs up a fortune in gold and gems it seems that the man is not mad after all!

Instead, it seems that finding a golden bug and a seemingly blank piece of parchment, the man soon realized that he had found the directions to Captain Kidd's long-lost treasure. In the first level of security, the directions were written in invisible ink, and in the second they were encoded. Just how did this man unravel this mystery and find the treasure? Read this book and find out!

The Gold Bug was written by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) for the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, in answer to a writing competition. In fact, it won handily, being published in June of 1843, and winning Poe the prize of $100. This is a great story, and a great read.

It's a little known fact that Edgar Allan Poe was the world's first mystery writer, producing this story and the Auguste Dupin stories some forty years before Arthur Conan Doyle invented Sherlock Holmes! This is a fascinating story, with an interesting storyline, and a wonderful look at cryptanalysis. If you like a good mystery, then get The Gold-Bug, it's great!

The Little Leather Library was a series of miniature, abridged leatherbound volumes of famous speeches and works by classic literary authors. The leather covers were uniform in style and color. They were stamped with the title and author's name printed inside identical floral borders. The series was founded around 1914 and continued to be sold until 1923. Expect the pages near the covers to be age tanned by the leather.

Insect led discovery? You Kidd me.


3.5 out of 5