Writer Unboxed

I thought you might enjoy this, from NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is April Fools’ Day, a holiday celebrating practical jokes of all kinds. Some people say that April Fools’ Day began in France in 1582 when the Gregorian replaced the Julian calendar, making New Year’s Day fall on January 1st instead of April 1st. At the time, news of such things traveled slowly, and it took many years for everyone to get up to speed. People who continued to celebrate New Year’s on April 1st came to be known as April Fools.

The news media have been responsible for some of the greatest April Fools’ Day pranks in history. In 1977, the London newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page supplement commemorating the anniversary of the independence of San Serriffe, a completely imaginary small island nation located in the Indian Ocean. The article described the geography of the nation — it consisted of two main islands, which together formed the shape of a semi-colon; the northern one was called “Upper Caisse” and the southern one, “Lower Caisse.”

The island’s natives were of “Flong” ethnicity, but there were also the descendents of Europeans settlers who had colonized the nation: “colons.” The two groups had intermarried over the years; their offspring were “semi-colons.”

The capital of the nation was Bodoni and the national bird, the “Kwote.”

In the supplement, there were even advertisements from real companies. Texaco announced a contest whose winner would receive a two-week vacation to the island’s Cocobanana Beach. Kodak placed an ad saying, “If you have a picture of San Serriffe, we’d like to see it.”

The day it ran, The Guardian was flooded with calls for more information. Travel agents and airline companies complained to the editor because the news had been disruptive to their businesses — customers refused to believe that the islands were only imaginary.

The Guardian has reused the prank on a few other April Fools’ Days — in 1978, 1980, and 1999 — and each time the island has changed location, moving from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea to the North Atlantic.

Writers are sneaky folk. Who are you fooling today?

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.

Therese Walsh

View all posts by Therese Walsh
Therese's website

Comments Off