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Stolen Socks and Counterfeit Cricket

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How Lenin Became A Mushroom-A Soviet Prank

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How To Buy a Hockey Team

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Disney Hoaxes and Scams

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The (Fake) Autobiography of Howard Hughes

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Weekly World News and the Bat Boy Xtravaganza

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MishMash Episode

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The Decatur Daily Review, Illinois, May 17, 1936

Just jumping around from one party to another…

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Daily Mirror, England, April 8, 1920

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The Wichita Beacon, Kansas, January 4, 1922

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Solar eclipse over Shelbyville, Kentucky, August 7, 1869.

(Cambridge University)

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The Return of Martin Guerre

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One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

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XIX century Library at Marienburg Castle, Germany

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The Cardiff Giant

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The Strange Case of the McNally Twins

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Girolamo Guiseffi, 1906. Detail from a wedding dress.