Page 4 - April 2024 Newsletter

"April Fools!" after revealing their pranks.

One of the most famous April Fools' prank involved San Serriffe - a
fictional island nation invented for April Fools' Day 1977, by The
Guardian newspaper. It was featured in a seven-page hoax
supplement, 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. The supplement provided an elaborate
description of the nation as a tourist destination and developing
economy, but most of its place names and characters were puns
and plays on words relating to printing (such as "sans-serif" and
the names of common fonts - the capital city was Bodoni). The
original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near
Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two planes there a
few days before publication it was moved to the Indian Ocean,
near the Seychelles islands. The authors made San Serriffe semi-
colon shaped and a moving island – a combination of coastal
erosion on its west side and
deposition on the east
causing it to move towards
Sri Lanka, with which it
would eventually collide, at
about 1.4 kilometres per
year.

San Serriffe was one of the
most famous and
successful hoaxes of recent
decades; it has become
part of the common cultural
heritage of literary humour,
and a secondary body of
literature has been derived
from it.

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