The Guardian's 1977 April Fools supplement invented San Serriffe, a fictional island nation built around printing and typography jokes.
Published on 1 April 1977, the seven-page supplement presented San Serriffe like a serious foreign-country report, complete with geography, politics, travel information, and advertisements. Its name resembles “sans serif,” a typeface without finishing strokes. Place names and personalities also referenced fonts and printing terms.
The imagined country was initially supposed to lie near Tenerife, but the location was shifted to the Indian Ocean after a real aviation accident nearby. The joke even explained that San Serriffe was a “moving island,” drifting because of erosion and deposition. Many readers were fooled, and The Guardian received letters from people claiming to have visited it.
San Serriffe is not the same kind of fictional country as Freedonia, Ruritania, or Genovia: those belong to films, novels, or television, while San Serriffe was specifically created as a newspaper April Fools hoax. The Guardian revived the idea in later jokes and features.