Now I Know More (9 page)

The
Times
casually referred to him as “the Bronx Fuehrer” multiple times in its coverage of his “bloodless coup” the next day. Further, the
Times
called Marble Hill the Bronx's “Sudetenland,” a reference to the section of Czechoslovakia that the Nazis had annexed a year prior. All of this was done tongue-in-cheek, of course, but apparently in the spring of 1939, it was perfectly okay for a major U.S. publication to jokingly liken an American politician to Adolf Hitler.

As for Marble Hill itself, the attempted annexation failed—it had no lasting impact on the geography of New York City. To this day, the neighborhood remains a part of Manhattan, although residents go to schools in the Bronx and are serviced by Bronx-based emergency responders.

Travelers starting in the New York City area and making their way across New York State—perhaps to a resort in the Catskills or to Binghamton University—may stop at the
Roscoe Diner
. It sits on Route 17, one of the main thoroughfares between the city and points westward, and has a reputation extending for miles, in part because you can get some very good French toast there. Otherwise, you are in the middle of nowhere. Roscoe, the town (and it's not really a town, but a “census designated place”), has only 900 or so residents. The nearby municipality of Agloe has even fewer: no one lives there.

But that's because it only kind of exists.

If two companies make a map of the same area but do so independent of each other, the maps should have some identical data. Towns and roads and bodies of water need to be represented accurately or drivers and others using the maps to navigate their surroundings will certainly get lost. Sure, you can be creative when it comes to choice of colors, fonts, or line thickness, but the locations of things have to be right or the map won't be very useful.

As a consequence of this, it's very easy for a third party to start making maps—the mapmaker simply has to copy the data from any other reliable map and reproduce it. To some degree, copyright law should prevent this, but outright copying isn't so easy to prove. As a solution, some mapmakers add fake streets (called “trap streets”) or even fake towns (often called “paper towns”) into their maps. Any third party copying their work will also copy the fictional creation unique to the original mapmaker's product.

According to novelist and YouTube celeb
John Green
in a TEDx talk, the General Drafting Company in 1937 did just this with the town of Agloe, creating it out of thin air at the intersection of two dirt roads just a few miles from Roscoe. (Green later used Agloe as one of the locations for his novel,
Paper Towns
, and as the inspiration for its title.) A few decades later, Agloe appeared again, but this time in a map made by a different, unrelated company—Rand McNally. General Drafting thought they had caught Rand McNally red-handed, but Rand McNally had a good and surprising defense:

The county clerk's office had given them the information.

It turns out that, in the early part of the 1950s, someone armed with the General Drafting map went to visit Agloe. Seeing nothing there, he figured that opportunity had knocked. This lost-to-history fellow probably guessed that others would also come to Agloe—it was on the map, after all!—and would expect to find something there. So he opened a small shop and called it the Agloe General Store. Over the next forty years, the fictional town of Agloe grew. As Green notes, at its largest, Agloe had a gas station, the general store, and two houses. Most importantly, Agloe had the attention of the county administrators. They considered Agloe a real place, and therefore, so did Rand McNally's team of cartographers.

Today, sadly, Agloe is gone. The buildings are abandoned if not destroyed, and the mapmakers of the world no longer recognize its existence.

“A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man,” said Jebediah Springfield, the namesake and founder of the hometown of Homer and Marge Simpson's family. The word “embiggen,” of course, isn't a word at all, despite the assertion of schoolteacher Miss Hoover that it is a “perfectly cromulent word.” (It shouldn't surprise anyone that “cromulent” is, also, a made-up nonword.) One can say that Mr. Springfield's esquivalience in formulating a motto for his town via a well-known speech was disappointing. After all, one would think that Jebediah's investment in the region and in his own legacy would have compelled him to invest the time needed to craft a message involving, you know, actual words. But it wasn't to be. The dord of fake words attributed to him is, therefore, incredibly high.

And yes, “esquivalience” is made up, too. Same with “dord.” You can find both in a dictionary, though, if you look hard enough—but for two very different reasons.

First came “dord,” courtesy of the G. and C. Merriam Company (a predecessor of Merriam-Webster). “Dord” first appeared in its 1934 edition of the
New International Dictionary
as a noun from the disciplines of physics and chemistry, meaning “density.” The error was due to odd typesetting at the time. The entry was supposed to be “D or d”—that is, a capital or lowercase letter D—the dictionary noting that either could be used, in physics or chemistry, as an abbreviation for “density.” But the entry was set as “D o r d,” and a later editor removed what appeared to be three unnecessary spaces.

“Dord” remained in subsequent editions through 1939, when a proofreader realized that the word lacked an etymology and called its veracity into question. Other dictionaries used the word until 1947, likely having copied from old dictionaries (including, perhaps, those of competitors). This may have inspired the creation of “esquivalience.”

“Esquivalience” was first spotted in the 2001 edition of the
New Oxford American Dictionary
(NOAD), a noun meaning “the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities; the shirking of duty.” It was crafted by an editor named Christine Lindberg, according to the
New Yorker
, and was included for the sole purpose of catching those who copied the NOAD team's work. This was more than a matter of pride—if the word appeared in another publication, NOAD immediately had evidence that the second dictionary had violated NOAD's copyright.

Which is exactly what happened. The “word” appeared on Dictionary.com, which attributed it to
Webster's New Millennium Dictionary
, but it was removed from both after the ruse was revealed. The Oxford team didn't pursue any legal action against either company.

Bestseller lists are self-explanatory: Books make the list when lots of people buy them. Sell enough, you make the list. Pretty straightforward stuff. There are wrinkles, of course. For example, a book will often crack the bestseller list even before it hits shelves, as presales vault the tome into notoriety. That's what happened in 1956, when the book
I, Libertine
by Frederick R. Ewing made the
New York Times
bestseller list before publication. It was a coup for Mr. Ewing, who not only had never written a book before but also didn't exist.

For that matter, neither did the book.

The credit—or perhaps, blame—goes to a late-night radio host named Jean Shepherd. Shepherd is probably best known for his story collection
In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash
, which was later adapted into the movie
A Christmas Story
(which Shepherd himself narrated). In this case, he wanted to pull a prank, one designed to show how silly bestseller lists were.

He asked his listeners to go into bookstores across the country and order the aforementioned book by Mr. Ewing, and he provided his listeners with a loosely established plot outline in case bookstore clerks were looking for more information. The prank was intended to simply confuse a bookseller or two. Shepherd believed the stores would inform the customers that no such title existed; that's what happened to him when he tried to buy a book of old radio scripts that, apparently, had never been printed.

But that's not what happened. The book—the nonexistent book—took on a life of its own. Even though it didn't exist, book clubs and book reviewers were talking about it, according to listeners who called in to Shepherd's radio show. In a later interview about the hoax, Shepherd noted that a church in Boston had added the book to the proscribed list, banning parishioners from reading it. The attention around the book was so great that many retailers asked their book buyers about the title and in doing so, caught the eye of industry experts. This surge in popularity earned the title the notice of the bestseller lists, and, perhaps more importantly, of Ian Ballantine, publisher of Ballantine Books. Ballantine tracked down the mysterious origins of the title and contacted Shepherd.

Ballantine, Shepherd, and novelist Thomas Sturgeon met for lunch and discussed making Shepherd's joke into a real book. A few months later,
I, Libertine
—a 151-page novel in both paperback and hardcover—hit bookstores across the country. The
Wall Street Journal
ran a front-page article about the hoax, so there was little risk of any readers being bamboozled, and in any event, the proceeds of the book went to charity.