Alternating colored segments on the magazine’s spine make WIRED recognizable on nearly any bookshelf. But to celebrate our 20th anniversary year, at the suggestion of WIRED's editors and ably assisted by their talented graphic artists, puzzlemaker Eric Harshbarger and I broke that pattern. If you stack the covers for the issues from January to December with covers facing up, you get a surprising result.

In block letters three issues tall, a message reads as:

Our first instruction to our writers: Amaze us.

That’s a quote from Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto all the way back in issue 1.1.

This wasn't easy to spot, even though it was right in front of the readers' eyes. It took nine issues for reader Ben Allen of Riverside, California, to crack it using the spreadsheet program LibreOffice Calc. "I shaded the boxes black to match the spines. After that, I started to look for patterns," Allen says. "The one thing that gave me the clue on where to separate were the Os, because they are so defined." A Google search revealed the rest of the message.