Thread: A fresh look at Pook.

Just picked up the book about a week ago, so this is my first post. I might be a bit behind on some of the puzzles, but I've done my best to get caught up on most of them via these forums, so I'm posting this in the hopes that it's not too terribly obvious.

I've been trying to look at Pook from a slightly different angle from most, focusing not on images but on text and on the poem. I'll quote the lines from the poem I think most pertinent (pasted from the reference copy on the poem forum):

P48: WITHIN THE TEXT YOU HAVE THE KEY
P52: FOR THE ONE THAT IS MISSING YOU DID NOT SEE

Pook is a treasure like the others, but his picture doesn't appear with theirs at the end of the book. It only makes sense to me for him to be "the one that is missing." If that's the case, a reasonable reading of the poem suggests that the clues to his location are "within the text," as opposed to being largely in the illustrations like the other treasures. This would make him consistently distinct from the other twelve, which seems sensible in light of how he's been handled so far.

I've got a few other things running through my head about this, but I'll hold on to them for now to see some thoughts on this. Comments? Questions? So obvious it's not worth mentioning? I'd be very interested to see what some of the more seasoned hunters think.

Just to clarify, do you believe that none of the illustrations with Pook in them have nothing to do with solving the Pook solution? It seems to me like it would be hard to find all of the hints within the text solely without using any visual references, such as the 'trees' that the token finders say are similar to the trees in the book. CJ4

I'm not sure I'm willing to go quite so far as to say the illustrations of Pook have nothing to do with his solution. The line from the poem says that the text is the key, not that it alone will provide the answer. I think that the Pook pictures could serve as a guide to which portions of the text will be most important to deriving his location, perhaps, but the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that there won't be a code within the illustrations for him like there have been for the others. If there is a code, we'll likely have to look to the story to decipher it, using the illustrations as a guide to which portions are most important.

Make sense? Totally off base? I'm new to this, so please, more comments!