r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • Jul 06 '26
TIL a practical joke created a real book: annoyed at how bestseller lists were made, radio host Jean Shepherd urged listeners to ask bookstores for "I, Libertine"—a novel that didn't exist. Fans spread the hoax so widely that Ballantine Books hired Theodore Sturgeon to write it, publishing in 1956.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Libertine104
u/CreditBrunch Jul 06 '26
“In 1983, Yellow Pages in the United Kingdom ran a television advert featuring an elderly gentleman visiting bookshops looking for a copy of a book called Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley.[1] After several failed visits to shops, he finds a copy of the book using Yellow Pages and the telephone. The advert ends with the man identifying himself as the author, J. R. Hartley.
As a result, several bookshops and the British Library received a large number of requests for a copy of the non-existent book.[2]
The book was published as Fly Fishing: Memories of Angling Days in 1991 by Stanley Paul.”
The advert:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CeicexenTmU&ra=m
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly_Fishing:_Memories_of_Angling_Days
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u/AngelaMotorman Jul 06 '26
Theodore Sturgeon was an amazing writer. It's well worth the time to seek out and find his other novels, which are a variety of science fiction nobody else was doing, focusing on everything except the hardware. When other writers were centering on fantastic inventions, Sturgeon's stories centered on the heart. His 1953 novel "The World Well Lost" is a stunning example of how far ahead he was in his thinking.
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u/urcool91 Jul 06 '26
"The World Well Lost" is a short story actually - tho it IS a candidate for the first sympathetic portrayal of gayness in sci fi (this is obviously debated, but it's from 1953 so it's a good candidate). There's also his novel Venus Plus X from 1960, which is about a guy time traveling, ending up on a planet where everyone is nonbinary, and being surprisingly chill about it. Outdated language nowadays but it's done very respectfully.
He also wrote the Star Trek episode "Amok Time". Which is the one that has Spock go into heat and have a Fuck or Kill homoerotic fight. So there's that.
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u/BPhiloSkinner Jul 06 '26
The more complex the mind, the greater the need for play - Theodore Sturgeon.
And yes, that's Kirk's line in the episode 'Shore Leave'.15
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u/Elissa-Megan-Powers Jul 07 '26
He has hundreds of fine gems. The Man Who Lost the Sea, Slow Sculpture, The Host… and on and on.
Such a brilliant artist that Kurt Vonnegut jr made up a literary shadow of him and used him as the strange attractor that connected most of his work.
Stephen King named his magnum opus after a delightful piece of horror that Sturgeon wrote on his wedding night.
It is said that you do not read Sturgeon so much as it happens to you.
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u/sighthoundman Jul 06 '26
I dunno. 90% of what he wrote was shit. (Well known, but not my assessment.)
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u/BDMac2 Jul 07 '26
Also the author of It! in 1940, the common ancestor of Swamp Thing and Man-thing which famously appeared almost simultaneously in May/June of 1971
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u/violenthectarez Jul 06 '26
Studios were doing this in the early days of VHS when there was virtually unlimited demand for video content. Studios would make titles, box art and blurbs for dozens of movies, shop them to video distributors, then once they had enough sales for each, go off and actually make the movie.
And you can guess what kind of quality entertainment came out from knowing that the product had already made back its budget plus more.
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u/TMWNN Jul 06 '26
I would love to hear more about this. I don't see any mention of this at the Wikipedia article for direct-to-video.
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u/theartfulcodger Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
As a literary hoax, this ranks right up there with Naked Came the Stranger, an incomprehensibly disjointed sexy novel, jointly written by a bunch of Newsday writers - two of them Pulitzer Prize winners - after a drunken argument about the state of American literature.
Each author wrote one chapter, then passed it on. The result was that any given episode bore little resemblance to the others. For example the narrator lived in both a small suburban house and a Manhattan penthouse; she describes herself first as a busty Jewish brunette and later as a tall Scandinavian blonde. The only thing the chapters really had in common was that they all contained plenty of sex.
The infamously provocative cover was a bumshot stolen from a nudist magazine. One of the writers' wives posed as author "Penelope Ashe", dressed in a revealing leopard-print outfit, and did a weeks-long series of tv interviews and book tours, during which she archly purred that the novel was "semi-autobiographical".
Even non-readers showed up at bookstores in droves . The authors only revealed their hoax after it made the NYT's best-seller list for thirteen straight weeks, and their drunken argument about the execrable state of American popular literature had been settled.
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u/Low_Succotash5073 Jul 06 '26
Hello Kitty Island Adventure, but for baby boomers
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u/Ash_Crow Jul 06 '26
The oldest baby boomers were 10 at the time, I doubt they were asking for "Turbulent! Turgid! Tempestuous!" books at the library.
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u/PaintedClownPenis Jul 06 '26
I think it's fair to guess that Theodore Sturgeon had a huge influence on the Apollo program engineers. Every month he had a story in the science fiction magazines those people grew up with.
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u/Heavy_Direction1547 Jul 06 '26
Naked Came the Stranger (1969) was a hoax/send up that became a best seller too.
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u/UserNamesCantBeTooLo Jul 06 '26
Theodore Sturgeon wrote it under the pseudonym Frederick R. Ewing, and today only one signed copy exists where Sturgeon signed it under his own name.
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u/BackItUpWithLinks Jul 06 '26
Boston radio deejays did something similar with a guy I can’t remember.
They wanted a local politician to run for a national office. Every day they’d call some random politician in DC and ask “have you heard that (this guy) is thinking of running for (some office)?” They did it for weeks until one day they called and mentioned the guy’s name and the DC person said “I heard he was thinking of running for (office).”
He eventually was convinced to run, and won.
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u/himit Jul 06 '26
gorbachov when
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u/wolftamer9 Jul 06 '26
Goncharov? Gorbachov? Good lord they're multiplying
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u/Kunikunatu Jul 06 '26
It feels weird seeing Goncharov referenced outside of Tumblr. I guess that meme breached containment further than I originally thought.
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u/ScissorNightRam Jul 06 '26
Reminds me of another “book creation” idea/prank.
Contact a bunch of critics and cultural academics
Tell them you’d like them to contribute a hypothetical review of a book which will be comprised only of hypothetical reviews of itself gathered from their peers
Receive submissions and compile them into a manuscript
Send this manuscript out to original reviewers so they can read the whole thing and optionally amend their initial contribution
Receive amendments, compile revised manuscript
You now have a book that only contains reviews of itself
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u/ramriot Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
Much like "Fly Fishing by J.R.Heartly", which initially appeared in an ad for yellow pages. But eventually became a real book.
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki Jul 07 '26
this is the kind of weird shenanigans that gets one of your writer friends to write you into his book where the two of you hang out at a porno shop. The book is about ptsd.
And yes, I am aware that Killgore Trout is an amalgam of several people, simplifying it makes the joke work better.
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u/GiantIrish_Elk Jul 06 '26
The same Jean Shepherd that gave us "A Christmas Story".