Evansville Vanderburgh Public Library

The Formosa fraud, the story of the fake writings of George Psalmanazar, one of the greatest charlatans In literary history ; with the full text of his book "A description of Formosa" and extra writings on his alleged travels and his spurious responses to skeptical objections, Graham Earnshaw

eng

no index present

non fiction

The Formosa fraud

dictionaries

Graham Earnshaw

the story of the fake writings of George Psalmanazar, one of the greatest charlatans In literary history ; with the full text of his book "A description of Formosa" and extra writings on his alleged travels and his spurious responses to skeptical objections

More than 300 years ago, Taiwan was a controversial topic in London, thanks to a stupendous fraud perpetrated by a Frenchman claiming to have been born there. He made up an entire fantasy for the island with a fake history, a fake language and long list of outrageous claims that made his book, A Description of Formosa, a publishing sensation in London in 1704. Even the Bishop of London swallowed Psalmanazar's story and invited him to teach his (fake) Formosan language at Oxford University. The Formosa fantasy world he created, including elephants and camels, gold mines and outlandish religious sacrificial ceremonies, almost rivals Tolkein's Middle Earth, with the crucial difference that many people believed it to be real. This is the story of one of the great frauds in literary history

adult