San Serriffe

sanseriffe

I’d never heard of this oddity before but I wonder, do any Dabblers remember this whimsical shaggy dog story that appeared in The Guardian way back in 1977? And do you know anyone who was taken in by it?

San Serriffe is a fictional island nation created by the Guardian newspaper for April Fool’s Day 1977. A seven-page hoax supplement was published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the island’s independence, complete with themed advertisements from major companies. This elaborate description of the nation, using puns and plays on words relating to typography, was reported as legitimate news. Because typographic terminology had not yet spread through widespread use of word processing software, these jokes were easily missed by the general public, and many readers were fooled.

The idea for the hoax came from the Guardian’s Special Reports Manager Philip Davies. In a 2007 interview he said “The FT was always doing special reports on little countries I’d never heard of. I was thinking about April Fool’s Day 1977 and I thought, why don’t we just make a country up?” Initially, the supplement featuring the fictitious archipelago was to be a single page. However, the newspaper realized that a larger, more in-depth review would generate greater revenue in the form of advertising. Special Reports editor Stuart St. Clair Legge was the one to suggest the name San Serriffe, and Geoffrey Taylor designed the semi-colon shaped map of the island, based on a shrunken version of New Zealand.

The Guardian’s San Serriffe April Fool’s joke was one of the most famous and successful hoaxes of recent decades; it has gained something of a literary heritage, and a secondary body of literature has been derived from it. The nation was reused for similar hoaxes in 1978, 1980 and 1999. In April 2009 the geography, history and culture of San Serriffe featured heavily in the paper’s cryptic crossword. Should you be so inclined, any reader who signs up to the Guardian website may select San Serriffe as his or her country of origin.

San Serriffe was described as an archipelago in the southern ocean consisting of two main islands and a number of smaller ones. Of the larger islands, the more northerly (the Caissa Superiore or Upper Caisse) being roughly round and the more southerly (the Caissa Inferiore or Lower Caisse) round but with a promontory extending south-westwards from the south-east, at Thirty Point. Owing to a peculiarity of ocean currents and erosion, the exact position of the islands varies. On 1 April 2006 The Guardian reported that San Serriffe was then just off New Zealand’s South Island, but if the rate of movement really is 1.4 km per year as published, San Serriffe should stay in the Indian Ocean for several millennia.

 

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About Author Profile: Worm

In between dealing with all things technological in the Dabbler engine room, Worm writes the weekly Wikiworm column every Saturday and our monthly Book Club newsletters.

7 thoughts on “San Serriffe

  1. philipwilk@googlemail.com'
    April 20, 2013 at 08:46

    I remember missing the Guardian that day (I was in my third year at university and spending a lot of time in the library, even in the Easter vacation) but being told about it the day after. I might have tumbled the hoax, knowing already by then what Gill Sans was. When I got a job in publishing a couple of years later, San Serriffe was still recalled with fond amusement, and old hands saw it as one of the truly memorable hoaxes, comparable to the great Spaghetti harvest hoax on Panorama twenty years before.

  2. jgslang@gmail.com'
    April 20, 2013 at 09:04

    Remember it well. And blessed with an oldest friend who was a graphic designer and being thus slightly cognizant of the terminology, was able to resist the hoax. Still love the idea, though. Maybe it’s me, but it seems to conjure a more spacious era of journalism. Everyone does April Fools now, but seven pages? Of course, to paraphrase Ms Rice-Davies, I would say that, wouldn’t I.

  3. peter.burnet@hotmail.com'
    Peter
    April 20, 2013 at 11:32

    A good innocent hoax is a thing of beauty. Another classic was when in the seventies staff at an American publishing house decided to commission and publish a parody of the “racy” Harold Robbins/Jacqueline Susann novels of the era. They comissioned about a dozen authors to write a chapter based on a simple outline, their only instructions being to put in lots of sex and make sure the writing was consistently execrable. It came out as Naked Came The Stranger and stayed on the bestseller list for several months before the spoof was revealed.

    I bought it after the truth came out and remember dissolving in peals (the first sentence had a guy driving by “freshly-butchered” suburban lawns). I like to think I would have caught on before, but I have little confidence such is so.

    • george.jansen55@gmail.com'
      George
      April 20, 2013 at 13:02

      Peter, I believe that these were all reporters for the Long Island newspaper Newsday. The fellow who led the team died within the last year, and got a fair sized obituary in the New York Times.

      Would that only spoofers wrote bad prose. I find myself groaning at some of what turns up in the books chosen for our neighborhood book club.

      • peter.burnet@hotmail.com'
        Peter
        April 20, 2013 at 13:31

        You are right, George. I forgot that getting it published was part of the hoax. Full Story here.

  4. george.jansen55@gmail.com'
    George
    April 20, 2013 at 12:58

    I blush to say that I invented “San Serif, confessor” a couple of years later. I think that this must have been independently, for the Guardian didn’t make much noise in Denver, where I lived in 1977.

    The student paper there always put a lot of effort into the April Fools Day edition, probably the greatest success being the small announcement that Dr. S. Freud would be dispensing cocaine at the Student Health Service office. I don’t know whether anyone showed up, but a friend overheard a couple of young women in the cafeteria discussing it with astonishment.

  5. steveplant@orange.fr'
    SRP
    April 20, 2013 at 22:20

    I don’t recall that one, but I remember swallowing hook, line and sinker the Guardian’s April 1st story about the world’s first photograph being found in the Japanese “Outer Fokus Mountains”. I read it, repeated it, defended its authenticity against all-comers etc etc etc until some god-damned know-all put me out of my misery. Oh dear.

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