Authors Peng Shepard and Anne Tyler show that family is...complicated
NPR's Book of the Day
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What Are Phantom Settlements?
In the early 1900s, there were two small time map makers who decided to make one of these intentional errors on their maps. So they made up a tiny town in rural upstate New York and they named it using a combination of their initials. And then about a year later, their competitor, Ran McNally, released a map of the same geographical area. These two map maker surprise, they spotted their tiny town on Ran McNally's map. They sued claiming copyright infringement because they argued that the only way that their town could have appeared on Ran Mcnally's map is if he had stolen their data instead of doing his own land survey.
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