The Guardian invents San Serriffe

APR 01 1977

The Guardian published a seven-page travel supplement on the tenth anniversary of independence of San Serriffe, a fictional Indian Ocean republic, laid out exactly like the paper's real country reviews. Every name was a printing pun: the islands Upper and Lower Caisse, the capital Bodoni, the leader General Pica, and an archipelago shaped like a semicolon. Hundreds of readers wrote in describing holidays there, and travel agents and airlines complained about customers who refused to accept the place did not exist. It is routinely ranked among the most successful hoaxes of the twentieth century.