San Serriffe

Common card · No. 369683

San Serriffe is a fictional island nation invented for April Fools' Day 1977 by Britain's The Guardian newspaper. It was featured in a seven-page hoax supplement, published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries. It commemorated 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 names of common fonts). The original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two Boeing 747s there a few days before publication, it was moved to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles islands. Because of this, the authors made San Serriffe a moving island – a combination of coastal erosion on its west side and deposition on the east cause it to...

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