Oct 26, 1809 - The Birth of Literary Hype The message at the bolton of the whird column of the October 26 1809 edition of the New York Evening Post ominously began with a single word: "Distressing." The following two paragraphs amounted to a missing persons notice, informing readers that a "small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat," had left his lodgings some time ago and "has not since been heard of."The advertisement cautioned that, "as there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind and as great anxiety is entertained about him," any information about him would be appreciated at "the Columbian Hotel on Mulberry Street." The ad ended with a postscript: "Printers of Newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity" by republishing the notice. Subsequent notices elaborated that the missing man, named Knickerbocker, had been spotted by passengers on the Albany stagecoach near Kings Bridge, holding "a small bundle tied in a red bandana," and that he had left in his lodgings "a very curious kind of a written book" that the hotel proprietor would have to sell to collect his back rent. True to his word, the proprietor published the book on December 6, 1809. Humanity undoubtedly benefited from the discovery of Diedrich Knickerbocker's book, History of New-York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, but the chief beneficiary was Washington Irving. Under the guise of his narrator, the fictional Knickerbocker, Irving not only fertilized New York's Dutch roots for a city struggling with its own identity; he also helped establish the city as a cultural mecca. At the same time, he perpetrated a fabulous literary hoax that became a paradigm for public relations in the publishing industry.In 1809 New Yorkers were celebrating the bicentennial of Henry Hudson's voyage of discovery, but were still suffering an identity crisis after the Founding Fathers had transplanted the nation's capitol to the Potomac. Irving supplied that identity. As a cleverly satirical twenty-six-year-old, he supplanted the dominant Yankee hierarchy and created a brand that would be perpetuated over the course of two centuries in beers, hotels, baggy-kneed pants, and a heartbreaking basketball team.Irving's Knickerbocker, whose surname name was borrowed from an upstate family, provided the historical foundation, real or imagined, on which the New York mythos would thrive (Irving also popularized St. Nicholas, chimney and all) The "shabby and superior, iconic and intellectual, purveyor of 'fake history' nearly two centuries before Jon Stewart" was Irving's vehicle, wrote his biographer, Elizabeth A. Bradley. Irving, she added, was "not just the first writer to identify and exploit the market," but "his narrator became a market in and of itself." It was also Irving who in 1807 bestowed on New York the nickname "Gotham," after the fabled English village whose ingenious inhabitants behaved so bizarrely in the early twelfth century that, rather than expropriate the townspeople's property, King John and his tax collectors bypassed the place altogether. (No reflection on out-of-towners, but the town inspired this immortal truth: "More fools pass through Gotham than remain in it.") "What constitutes a New Yorker?" a New York Times headline inquired in 1907, a century after Irving's history was published. The article was illustrated with an oversize portrait of Father Knickerbocker.TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
