
A Bestseller Book That Didn't Exist - Tomte
http://www.jmarkpowell.com/the-bestseller-book-that-didnt-exist-how-the-author-of-a-beloved-christmas-classic-pulled-off-the-hoax-of-the-century/
======
onosendai
You can listen to Jean Shepherd himself tell the story of the "I, Libertine"
hoax during a radio show here: [http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-
libertine.html](http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/06/the-i-libertine.html)
It's 40 min long, but well worth it and hilariously funny. I've always been
fascinated by this story, it speaks volumes of the world we live in and how
people are easily influenced and manipulated.

~~~
xefer
Jean Shepherd was a genius.

Hundreds of his shows from the 50s through to the 70s are archived at
archive.org—so many in fact that I was able to locate the very first show I
ever listened to as a kid decades ago. I hadn't heard the episode since its
original broadcast but I recognized it immediately which indicates how vividly
he can tell a story.

A couple of particularly good ones that I remember:

65\. Carbide Canon 88\. Toledo Heat
[https://archive.org/details/JeanShepherd1973](https://archive.org/details/JeanShepherd1973)

------
tehwalrus
The part that particularly ticked me was that journalists were literally
writing about having had lunch with a non-existent person. Further
confirmation (bias) for the thesis that most media will publish lies without
compunction.

~~~
RyJones
The most charitable view I can think of is they were in on the joke. The least
charitable is in line with yours.

~~~
Riseed
There's also the possibility that those journalists had lunch with someone who
convincingly claimed to be Frederick R. Ewig.

~~~
RyJones
I hadn't considered that. Of course, who could dispute it? It isn't like the
real Ewig is going to stand up to defend his honor.

------
smcl
Btw if this has peaked your interest in Jean Shepherd and you want to hear
more, Hearing Voices podcast did a two part tribute to him called "A Voice In
the Night":

Pt 1 - [http://hearingvoices.com/2010/07/hv067-jean-
shepherd-1/](http://hearingvoices.com/2010/07/hv067-jean-shepherd-1/)

Pt 2 - [http://hearingvoices.com/2010/07/hv068-jean-
shepherd-2/](http://hearingvoices.com/2010/07/hv068-jean-shepherd-2/)

There's also a decent amount of his radio shows recorded and digitized by fans
under the name "The Brass Figlagee" which is also available as a podcast @
[http://shepcast.blogspot.cz](http://shepcast.blogspot.cz)

~~~
KMag
I'm not sure I quite get your pun. It's commentary on social climbers?

~~~
mmahemoff
You could also just explain to smcl they spelled piqued wrong.

~~~
smcl
Oh man I feel stupid

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howling
First thing I do after reading this story: search online to make sure this is
not itself a hoax. Seems legitimate though, or somebody has planned the hoax
since 2009.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=I,_Libertine&oldi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=I,_Libertine&oldid=317560497)

~~~
ams6110
Would be an awesome meta-hoax if it were. Are there any popular examples of
this happening? A hoax that is itself a hoax?

~~~
aaron695
There's a joke on a hoax on a hoax - Bielefeld conspiracy.

Pretty sure there's a hoax where people said an author? wasn't real.

So the hoax was a persons existence was a hoax. But cannot cite. 'Hoax' brings
up as much spam as 'free software' on Google.

Perhaps the hoax was the person was made up for other reasons than a hoax,
perhaps a lie or a joke. So it might not be meta.

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bshimmin
I was interested to note that Theodore Sturgeon, who ended up writing the real
"I, Libertine", is the same science-fiction writer and author of the famous
"Sturgeon's Law":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

~~~
Procrastes
Sturgeon's Law/Revelation, has been a great comfort to me when I look back
over my side projects and writing. I'm batting about average!

------
fit2rule
A delightful story .. I tried to work out a way such a hoax could be played
out today, and I'm sure there are other examples .. I figure, though, that
with Google and the interwebs, either one of two things can happen: a) Nobody
gets hoaxed because they figure it out rapidly, or b) everyone gets hoaxed
because: hivemind.

Actually, now that I think of it, probably both conditions can occur
simultaneously .. ouch. We really are a hive species.

~~~
tjradcliffe
I have long suspected that the story of "The Aristocrats" is a hoax, although
I've never bothered to pursue the question:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aristocrats_%28film%29)

My reasons for this are a) it is very difficult to find any pre-2005 citation
for the joke, despite one supposed reference from 1975; b) the details of the
story don't seem to me very plausible given what I know of comedians; and c)
it's the kind of thing Penn Jillette would do.

So the story may have already played out in the modern era, if not in this
case then perhaps in others: the 'Net is so full of nonsense and mis-
information it would be very hard to tell. Social fragmentation of information
sources likely makes it even easier today... you could argue that Birthers and
the like are an example of this kind of hoax (or victims of it.)

~~~
Sanddancer
It's a peek into the insider game of comedy. Every group has some gag, some
saying that gets circulated that doesn't leave that group due to lack of
context -- you had to be there type things -- or due to it being risque and
taboo, like the Aristocrats. A similar thing for newspaper writers would be
the Order of the Occult Hand [1], in which writers tried to slip that phrase
into copy without the editors discovering it. These things are not cataloged
because cataloging them would defeat the whole purpose. While the net has a
lot of info, there's quite a bit of inside baseball that doesn't make it
online.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Occult_Hand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Occult_Hand)

------
GCA10
Great fun -- but this version of the prank is probably only about 85%
accurate. It's not clear the phantom book ever did make any best-seller lists,
though it certainly did get talked about. Here's a 2013 telling from The Awl
that's a little more careful with the details:
[http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-
brilliant-m...](http://www.theawl.com/2013/02/the-man-behind-the-brilliant-
media-hoax-of-i-libertine)

Either way, it's a wonderful story.

