Objects and stories were equivalent treasures, meant to be pondered, weighed and preserved.
They were allowed seven choices each, with Wilson sticking largely to the feminine classics (including Little Women, Ballet Shoes, What Katy Did), Morpurgo plumping for many of the boys' equivalents (Treasure Island, The Happy Prince, Just So Stories) and Michael Rosen gathering together an eclectic assortment from Mr Gum and the Dancing Bear, to Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.
What Pet Should I Get?, in which a brother and sister visit a pet shop but find it impossible to choose which animal to bring home, is described by Random House as "the literary equivalent of buried treasure".
Recalling previous chain-mail frauds, the centre warned that alleged financial officials from various West African countries had e-mailed Americans claiming to have discovered the modern-day equivalent of buried treasure: dormant accounts holding vast amounts of money ready to be claimed.
Driving to your local big box store will give you instant gratification, but true bargain hunters use the Web, and a little bit of patience, to find the gadget equivalent of buried treasure.
It's like watching someone take off in a Porsche or maybe a Jaguar, doing the car equivalent of a treasure hunt.
The paintings, many from the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Shanghai Art Museum, are very fine, the Chinese equivalent of national treasures.
But yesterday Bowie admitted to being the equivalent of a national treasure.
"We carry a paper handmade by an elderly man in India — he's the equivalent of a national treasure, really," Mr. Aldera said.
While most of the other bullion in the Somerset treasure – the equivalent of four years' pay for a legionary officer – was of the debased mixture of metals in use beyond Britain too, that of Carausius is pure silver.
