Lindberg and Alpers' clever ruse was put to the test when a few years later, the map company Rand McNally printed its own version of a New Yoke State map, which featured the made-up Agloe. In the event of a copyright lawsuit, all they needed to do to prove that their map had been pirated was to point to Agloe, which obviously did not exist on any other map except their own because it was fake.

To do that, Lindberg and Alpers positioned the entirely fake hamlet of Agloe on the map of upstate New York just north of Roscoe. The General Drafting Company, one of the 'big three' mapmakers in the country in the 1930s, sought to safeguard its intellectual property. Lindberg, head of the General Drafting Company, had in mind when he teamed up with his assistant, Ernest Alpers, to concoct an entirely imaginary 'paper town', which the pair dubbed Agloe - the name an anagram of their initials, O.G.L. Hardly anyone ever visited the largely deserted, out-of-the-way site located some 120miles from New York City, which made it an ideal 'copyright trap,' as NPR reported last week, citing Frank Jacobs' blog Strange Maps.Ĭartographers seeking to prevent other companies from lifting their work without permission often resorted to trickery, inserting fictitious landmarks as tell-tale signs of piracy. Lindberg, head of the General Drafting Company, and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, made up a fake town and positioned it in Sullivan County as a way to protect their map from being lifted by other companies

Strange maps by frank jacobs