Which Conway Twitty song ...
... did Gary Brooker contribute to vocally, on an album entitled the 16 Hip Hits?
Choose one only, from the letters A, B, and C, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

A

      It’s Only Make Believe

B

     This is a Foolish Fantasy

C

     Linda on my Mind
 

Which of the following statements is true?
Choose one only, from the letters D, E and F, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

D

     Procol Harum played three times with Pink Floyd in November 1967

E

     Procol Harum played three times with The Doors in November 1967

F

     The Doors played three times with Pink Floyd in November 1967
 

Which of these statements is true?
Choose one only, from the letters G, H and I, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

G

     The foreword or preface to Procol Harum Day by Day was written by Franky Brooker

H

     The late Franz Kafka is the ghost-writer of Procol Harum Day by Day

I

     The preface or foreword to Procol Harum Day by Day was written by Carrie Fisher
 

Explain Wat Een Tijd?
Choose one only, from the letters J, K, L and M, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

J

     It's the Danish name for the Brooker/Reid/Fisher song One More Time

K

     It’s the Dutch title for a Brooker/Reid rarity, Dancing Underneath the Moon

L

     It's the Polish game show on which Ray Royer wrestled a live bear / axolotl

M

     It's a Dutch TV show on which Dancing Underneath the Moon was first heard
 

What is Gazza?
Choose one only, from the letters N, O, P and Q, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

N

     Gary Brooker’s own record label

O

     The title of a 1936 novel by Aldous Huxley

P

     Swedish parcel tape: ‘gazza’ purports to represent, onomatopoeically, the ripping noise it makes when unfurling

Q

     The Italian word for ‘raven’
 

Who or what is Christo Kouspetris?
Choose one only, from the letters R, S, T and U, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision

R

     A real person who introduced Gary Brooker to his wife-to-be, Franky

S

     The pseudonym of the 1983 chart duo featuring Sonny-boy and Elizabeth

T

     The producer of Procol’s Cypriot 45rpm single, The Blue Danube

U

     An anagram of ‘Skip, Heroic Trout’, the original title of Brooker/Reid's hit song, Musical Fish
 

V

Sundry photographs of Procol books in working environments
Using your skill and judgment, and closely considering all details in the shots, work out which one of these photographs
shows Procol Harum Day by Day propped up on or near the late Gary Brooker’s own piano
Choose one only, from the letters V, W, X, Y and Z, and make a note – in a place where you can find it later – of your decision
 

W

X

Y

Z

What to do next … long instructions, easy procedure

Write down the seven alphabetical letters corresponding to the correct answers to our questions above, and get your anagram hat ready.

If you rearrange these letters you’ll notice they spell the name of the actor who played Jim Morrison’s girlfriend in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film about The Doors.

Hard to see how that could be relevant here.

But they can also be rearranged to form the name of a well-known country, referred to in at least one of the Frans-scans, the excerpts you’ve already read in order to answer the fab questions above.

Look back again now over those scanned pages from the book and answer this simple, additional question:

What was the date (day, month, year) when Procol Harum … in the country you’ve discovered anagrammatically … enjoyed an elegant banquet with fans, organised by ‘Beyond the Pale’?

Your answer will be something in the form ‘4 May 1973’, but now write it down in numbers, as 04 05 1973 (or 05 04 1973 if you are in America).

Check that you've got eight digits altogether. They may not all be different. 

Next stage, carefully rearrange them in order of magnitude, smallest to largest.

In the example, 4 May 1973 > 04 05 1973 > 00134579.

Not a very pretty number, but perhaps the correct date will yield a neater one.

Next, add all eight numbers together with the aim of discovering their ‘digital root’ (our boffin friends would think of this in terms of ‘an iterative process of summing digits, using the result from the previous iteration to compute the digit sum’, while reminding us that ‘the process continues until a single-digit number is reached’).

So, the same example worked out in detail:

0+0+1+3+4+5+7+9 = 29 ... now add those last two numbers together
2+9 = 11 ... now add those last two numbers together
1+1 = 2

So in this case, your answer would simply be ‘2’.

And another exemplary working, just for clarity:

23 August 2004 > 23082004 > 00022348 > 0+0+0+2+2+3+4+8 = 19 > 1+9 =10 > 1+0 = '1', the answer in this case.

And now … all you need to do is identify the country, re-read the extracts to find the date of BtP’s elegant banquet, express that date in numbers, rewrite the numbers in order of magnitude, add them up iteratively until you have the single ‘Digital Root’ … then send that number to webmaster@procolharum.com along with a suitable street address to which you’d like your prize to be sent.

If you can’t face such a dog’s dilemma, bear in mind that there are only nine possible answers … ‘fools gold, cast the die’ as the poet saith.  
If you send the correct answer, we’ll put your name in the BtP Homburg, and on 1 December at noon (UK time) we’ll pull out three names ... now published above.

The first will win the book, the second the DVDs, and the third the Procol CDs.

Happy unravelling!

(Thanks as ever to Jane Clare in Western Australia for working through the puzzle and verifying the methodology)