Until I saw a CSPAN program this weekend, I’d never heard of one of the most successful literary hoaxes in history – the publishing of The Report From Iron Mountain, and it seems interesting enough to share.
The Report was supposedly a US government sponsored study written at the end of WWII, and the subject was how to return to a peacetime economy from a wartime one. The conclusion was that it couldn’t be done without a total collapse of the economy, and so the country would be better off continuing as if it were at war. The book is about the supposed report, written by a team of analysts hired to assess the report.
The brilliant thing IMO is that when the publisher hired the writer for the hoax book, he told them they had it backward. What he should start with is by writing the hoax report, and then let the outcome determine much of the content of the book.
The other brilliant thing is that while the report itself was totally bogus, it was thoroughly footnoted with real citations. The footnotes might or might not support the arguments or claims in the book as the author claimed, but they could be backtracked and found, giving the report a greater air of legitimacy.
To this day it’s still cited by people with some kind of axe to grind.
And there was legal fallout as well. Another publisher decided to independently publish the report, which they cribbed right out of the book. They thought they were reprinting a US government document, and there were no concerns about copyright or royalties or permissions. That was the nature of the hoax. In reality they ultimately learned they had re-published a work of fiction. They ended up have to settle with an unspecified payout to the hoaxter.
Anyway, that was my interesting learning of the weekend.
