you’ll shoot your eye out kid,

Ho, Ho, Ho !  Jean Shepherd best known for A Christmas Story which will run for 24 hours on TBS starting at 5pm PST tomorrow night, also loved a good prank.  Shepherd was more than a little fed up with bestseller lists and so as a broadcaster for WOR in New York in the 50s he directed his audience to go out to bookstores and request an imaginary book titled, I Libertine.  At the time, bestseller lists weren’t just based on sales, but also on customer requests.

From Nonstopbooks.

Listeners went out and asked for the book. Bookstores started to request the book from distributors. There were also great stories of people claiming to have read the book when it did not even exist. These were not the listeners of the radio program trying to perpetrate the hoax but people trying to avoid appearing unread.

Ballantine books in conjunction with Shepherd and SF writer Theodore Sturgeon created a real book to complete the hoax. Here is the record for the book on Amazon.

Wikipedia entry about I, Libertine.

You can listen here to an interview of Shepherd in 1968 where he discusses the hoax. (MP3) Here is a paraphrased transcript of the interview.

I can only imagine the troubles that his prank caused for the poor librarians trying to locate this book.

posting by jim