Background
The idea for the hoax came from the Guardian's Special Reports Manager Philip Davies. In a 2007 interview he said "The Financial Times was always doing special reports on little countries I'd never heard of. I was thinking about April Fool's Day 1977 and I thought, why don't we just make a country up?" Special Reports editor Stuart St Clair Legge suggested the name San Serriffe. Geoffrey Taylor designed the semicolon-shaped map of the island, based on a shrunken version of New Zealand.
Initially, the supplement featuring the fictitious archipelago was to be a single page, but the newspaper realized that a larger, more in depth review would generate greater revenue in the form of advertising.
Read more about this topic: San Serriffe
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