Among the ink-and-paper hoaxes, late in the nineteenth century the editors of the six volumes of Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography paid contributors for their entries. One or more needy writers submitted biographies of people who were supposed to have done scientific research in South America, some with bibliographies of their publications. The editors had never heard of those scientists and evidently were pleased to be able to include records of their lives and achievements in the biographical reference work. It wasn't until much later when a scientist used some of those entries as a starting place for his own research that he discovered that the entries were all fakes, that no such scientists had ever existed, and that there was no record of the published scholarship cited in the entries in Appleton's.

See Margaret Castle Schindler, "Fictitious Biography," American Historical Review 42 (1937): 680-690.

Some of that stuff is probably floating around on the Internet, right now, and if it is obvious that it came from Appleton's, people will probably still believe it.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
Please visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.virginia.gov<http://www.lva.virginia.gov/>


______________________________________
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at
http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html