Mapmakers used to plant small lies to catch thieves. Some time before the Second World War, Otto Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of the General Drafting Company put a town called Agloe, an anagram of their initials, at an empty crossroads in the Catskills, on a road map they made for Esso. If Agloe ever turned up on someone else’s map, they would know it had been copied. It did turn up, on a Rand McNally map, and the story goes that when the accusation came, Rand McNally answered that Agloe was real: there was a general store at that crossroads now, and it was called the Agloe General Store. Its owners had taken the name from the map.

I like that the trap was sprung by the one thing it assumed could never happen: someone looked at a town that wasn’t there and believed in it enough to open a shop. The store is long gone. The name stayed on maps for decades anyway, a place that was invented, then real, then invented again.