With little effort and expense, you can hide cash, armaments and even family from the menacing eyes of burglars, terrorists or anyone. Learn how to construct dozens of hiding places right in your house and yard. Here are small hiding places for concealing money and jewelry and large places for securing survival supplies or persons. More than 100 drawings show how to turn ordinary items into extraordinary hiding places.

Average Customer Review: ( 13 customer reviews )
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The outdoor hidies are great for those with their own land. There are several innovative ideas that the other books do not have, including a tree stash.

The structural hidies are also different -- these aren't just making false drawer bottoms. :) There are pipe, appliance, wall and even drain hidies. Furniture hidies are covered extensively as well, but this review focuses on what makes this book different from the other hiding books.

The away-from-home hiding places are ingenious, easy to do and will hide your valuables from the casual thief and the sticky-fingered maid alike. Obviously, there is little to no carpentry involved and in fact you could use the same principles in your own home if you are carpentry impaired like me. :)

One last strong point of this book is the writing. Throughout, it talks about the psychology of the thief and why some hides work better than others to prevent theft. The main focus is not hiding things from the government or the police, who often have a whole different mindset and a lot more time than a thief does. If you are more interested specifically in strategies to hide objects from law enforcement or the government, there are hiding books that focus on that rather than thieves and I recommend you get one of those instead.

Please note: As with all hiding place books, you simply must have some carpentry experience and a lot of patience. There are no step-by-step, hold-your-hand instructions on how to make a hiding place here (or in any other hiding book I've seen either). The ideas are presented, and it is up to you to make them work in your own home or land.

36 of 38 found the following review helpful:

Keeping people's noses out of your business!Apr 04, 2000

I found this book to be one of the most useful and surprising help books i have ever had the good fortune to stumble upon. When I saw 'How to Hide Anything' I had to buy it, and that was a choice I am glad I made. As a college student, I know there are things I don't necessarily want roommates, parents, and especially authorities to snoop around in. Often, I felt that my own hiding places still left me nervous. Other times, I hid things in such obscure places, I forgot where they were! This book, however, lives up to its title. Its ideas are ingenius and the drawings practically do the work for you. Now I am confident that everything I want to keep private will be kept private! Buy this book.

13 of 13 found the following review helpful:

Helpful AND FunnyNov 20, 2008
By Gandalf Parker
What I liked about this book was the carefree attitude. It did the subject the way I liked. As a fun idea to play around with. The suggestions were very good for the smaller things. How to hide money. How to hide jewelry. Then it grew to larger and larger items. Eventually it got into hiding a closet, hiding a room, hiding a house, hiding a corporation. :)

10 of 10 found the following review helpful:

... If You Want It to Be FoundOct 26, 2011
By Rafal Biernacki
This book is underwhelming. The ideas presented range from the obvious (drilled table leg) through the impractical (eat a hole in your concrete floor with strong acid; insert your stash; pour cement over it) to the completely preposterous (cut down a tree; insert stash into a vertically buried pipe section; insert entire tree to plug the pipe). No kidding.

The author is obviously an armchair theorist who didn't bother to actually build his designs. One design requires you to screw a wooden block onto a projecting screw whenever you want to close the hideout; there is nothing to keep the screw from turning apart from the wallpaper glued over the screwhead. Guess what, it won't work---as anyone who actually attempted it would at once realize.

The book deals essentially with three kinds of hideouts. One type is the tiny hideyhole useful for hiding a vial of drugs from a perfunctory search. The author manages to bungle even this relatively easy task: most of the ideas he presents are so cliched (behind an air-vent cover; taped under a sofa; in a false drawer bottom) that any competent searcher or burglar would not fail to search there first. Others are unusable: perhaps you _can_ drill a hole lengthwise in the wire of a TV antenna, but what would you hide in a space this small? Not even dope will fit.

The second class is used for hiding larger objects, from handgun-sized to person-sized. The author uses the word "elaborate" to refer to these hideouts, and this is quite right: elaborate to the point of utter ridiculousness is more like it, like the cut-and-replanted tree example above. See the cover of the book for another example: the idea could work for a stage magician's disappearing act, seen from afar; but anyone actually trying to open or shift the cabinet (and what searcher wouldn't?) will instantly realize that it is fake. Or the idea of building a brick wall on top of a wooden floor (ever try this?) then wriggling under the floorboards (maybe if you're a cockroach you will fit) to reach the other side. Think about it: if there is enough room under the floor (highly unlikely) and if you're concealing a human-sized trapdoor anyway (difficult), why build the brick wall?

The third class is outdoor hideouts. The principal idea here is to dig a reinforced pit, and roof it over with a slab covered with a very thin layer of turf. Guess what---the thin layer of turf will dry out more quickly than the surrounding soil, and will stand out so much anyone will notice it. You'd need at least a foot of soil to mask this---but then the slab as designed would be way too heavy to lift. This again goes to show that the author has never bothered to test his ideas in practice. He even proposes roofing the hideout with a turf-covered tarpaulin---what is he trying to build, a hideout or a pit trap? Or try this one: a vertically-buried large diameter pipe that you jump into and conceal yourself with a wooden lid that somebody (who?) helpfully pours a layer of dirty water over, to simulate a water-flooded drain. Guess what---either the lid wouldn't fit tightly enough and the dirty water would end up draining down into your compartment; or worse, it _would_ fit tightly enough and you would promptly suffocate in that pipe.

Summing up: there's hardly more than a handful of sensible ideas in this book, and all the workable ones deal with vial-sized objects. You're better off thinking up ideas on your own. If you insist on getting a sourcebook, I recommend Secret Rooms Secret Compartments, by Jerry Dzindzeleta. It is not perfect, being overpriced and too short; but the ideas presented are sound, the construction is well thought out and explained, and Dzindzeleta clearly did build most of his designs in practice.

19 of 23 found the following review helpful:

How to hide a few thingJan 25, 2007
By R. Montgomery "Unreconstructed Reb"
Like most Paladin books, this slim volume is serioulsy lacking in substance. If you want advice on how to hide some jewelry or your stash around the house, then this book will do it for you. Otherwise, this rather dated edition will leave you in the dark. Save your money. Do some web searches and you will probably come up with more complete and up-to-date information for only your time.

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