Being Mountweasled

Years ago, I was in the publishing business, specifically of subscription business newsletters. I went from reporter to editor to publisher of groups of regulatory and compliance newsletters for various industries – telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, food safety, information technology, even fashion and waste management.

We would trade or rent out to other publishers or marketers our subscriber lists. But because our customer information was such a valuable asset, we took steps to make sure lists were used appropriately by others.

For instance, we would “seed” them with phony names so we could monitor who was mailing to them. When mail would come to my address with a fake name, I knew the sender had used our list and could verify whether they had permission to do so.

The tactic isn’t used just for mailing lists. Reference works such as encyclopedias and dictionaries include fake entries so they can tell if a publisher is plagiarizing their content.

In a recent Washington Post Magazine article, Nick Norlen recounts tracking down the author of a well-known (in specialty publishing circles) fake biographical entry in New Columbia Encyclopedia. The entry, by one Agnes McKirdy:

Mountweasel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-73, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972). Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.

The entry is so revered that “mountweasel” has become a term for fake reference entries.

As for the fake name I used in my own mountweasel? Abe Utfase.