When Laurence Sterne published the third volume of his masterpiece Tristram Shandy 250 years ago, his many fans were well prepared for his playful style.

Sterne was already famous for teasing his readers and the public were not disappointed when they reached page 169. Without explanation, a colourful marbled image, of the kind usually seen at the front or back of a book, suddenly interrupts the narrative.

The perplexing page is one of the abiding puzzles of the English literary canon. To mark the anniversary of Sterne's subversive move, 169 leading artists and writers – including Quentin Blake, Lemony Snicket, Mark Wallinger, Patrick Marber, Ralph Steadman and the absurdist playwright NF Simpson, who died in August in August – have contributed their own versions of the marbled page and put them up for auction, unsigned, to raise funds for the Laurence Sterne Trust.

Sterne, a clergyman who was born in 1713 and who was one of the most celebrated humorists of his day, taunted his readers with the idea that the mystery of the marbled page would never be solved, but he did suggest that it stood as a "motly [sic] emblem of my work".

A display of the newly donated artworks, which will remain anonymous until the end of October, is already online. An exhibition is also being staged at Shandy Hall, Sterne's former home in the North Yorkshire village of Coxwold.

"Sterne's marbled page is pretty clever and the 169 contributors have produced some wonderful interpretations of the meaning of the 'emblem of my work'," said Patrick Wildgust, curator of the show and of Shandy Hall. "There are a number of practising marblers whose work is included too."

Writers Frank Cottrell Boyce, Iain Sinclair, Jonathan Meades and Graham Swift and poets Lavinia Greenlaw and Craig Raine have also contributed unattributed pieces. "Hopefully people will bid because they like the work they see before them and not because it is directly associated with a particular name. Keeping the identity of the maker hidden makes it into more of a game – and one that everyone can enjoy," explained Wildgust.

The original marbled page was hand-produced, so unique to each volume. This, Wildgust believes, was the point. Sterne was underlining the element of chance in his story and in life: "Things very rarely turn out as we plan so it is often best to just let things develop naturally. The true Shandean way."

"Motley" was the term traditionally used to describe the outfits worn by court jesters and students of Sterne link the marbled page to the author's fictional alter ego, Yorick, also the name of the jester in Hamlet. Earlier in Tristram Shandy Sterne had pulled off another literary stunt by printing an entirely black page to mark the death of Yorick, prefaced by the Shakespearean quote, "Alas! Poor Yorick".

In Volume III Sterne's narrator says, "You will no more be able to penetrate the moral of the next marbled page (motly emblem of my work!) than the world with all its sagacity has been able to unravel the many opinions, transactions and truths which still lie mystically hid under the dark veil of the black one."

In 2009 Shandy Hall invited artists to donate black pages to help the trust find matching funding to repair the lead valleys in the building's roof. Sterne wrote some of Tristram Shandy and his later work, A Sentimental Journey, while he lived there. "The fact that Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy over a number of years means that different aspects of the book can provide stimulus for new work," said Wildgust.

Modern editions of the novel have identical printed marbled pages, usually in black and white, so the impact of the multi-coloured marbling is lost.

Wildgust does not have funding yet for a catalogue of the show – anyone who successfully bids for a work at auction will be told who created it. The money raised will go towards weatherproofing the gallery's roof.

Place your bid by telephone (01347 868465), by email (shandyhall@dsl.pipex.com), or in person at the gallery in Coxwold. Bids start at £50, with a second bid at £75, a third at £100 and a fourth bid at £150. Subsequent bids must rise in £50 increments.