Hot on the heels of Warren Smith's Finders Keepers, ol' reliable Brad Steiger delivers his own treasure hunting text with the bold, fresh title of ... well, Treasure Hunting. Steiger thanks Smith for the use of his treasure archives, and I'm assuming they collaborated on writing their respective volumes because there's very little overlap between them. Steiger tackles the Oak Island mystery that Smith preferred to leave out, and the chapter here would show up slightly abbreviated in Steiger's pseudonymous 1972 Eric Norman title Beyond the Strange. Treasure Hunting is structured like any of Steiger's classic Forteana titles, just one short chapter after another, onward to the end, with plenty of cheesy dialogue and fictionalized reconstructions. Steiger also reuses the list of metal detecting/treasure hunting companies that Smith assembled in Finders Keepers. That humorously vague "tip" about some streams in some parts of South Carolina showing "good color" is also present in both volumes - don't make it too easy for us, guys!
Venturing abroad, Steiger gives us a pair of lost underwater nazi jackpots with Erwin Rommel's Corsican fortune and the lethal treasure of Lake Toplitz, which claims the life of diver Alfred Egner in 1963 as well as two unnamed men, brutally murdered, who may very well be completely made up for Steiger's storytelling purposes. Rumor and legend cloud the waters of the mind and provide Steiger with lots of plausible deniability ... he's not always sure if a treasure even exists at all, but he's just doing his part passing on the info! Again, these volumes are for daydreaming dads to fall asleep reading in their easy chairs, or maybe drum up a little business for Gardiner Electronics and the like when dad plunks down part of the vacation fund on a metal detector - "It'll be fun, Junior!"
The back page ads cover some UFO/Forteana and Old West titles, along with a classic treasure hunting title, Lost Mines and Hidden Treasure by one Leland Lovelace, originally published 1956.
