Chapter 2 of James C Scott’s famous book Seeing Like a State has a quote at the top attributed to a fictional writer who was invented by Borges in his short but mighty story, On Exactitude in Science (Borges, of course, famous for making up allusions and writers and all sorts of nonsense). So the attribution in Scott’s tome reads

Suárez Miranda’s Viajes de varones prudentes (1658)

When it should read

Borges’ On Exactitude in Science (1946)

Of course my first thought was to figure out if someone had written about this already, because for a book so famous it seems like a sort of egregious error. Not least because the time frame under discussion in the chapter is right around the year written in the incorrect attribution, making it seem even more like a primary source that Scott is citing. Which is silly because the text he quotes refers to the fun concept of a map at a 1:1 scale (clearly impossible, very fun to think about, etc). And yet - my quick googling didn’t find anything.

The tl;dr moral of this story is actually just that google sucks now, but read on:

I decided rather than write an essay, I’d just add a quick entry under the Influences and Legacy section of the Wikipedia article for the Borges story; that way people googling later would have something to hang a hat on. So I did. And it was almost immediately rolled back by a very helpful editor who explained that that section required an additional source (I guess so that these sections don’t get stuffed with every single reference… yes ok I agree actually).

That led to me attempting some humor in the talk section of a related question for that page:

which unexpectedly led to this marvelous editor not just adding my text back into this wikipedia page, not just first doing the research to find a scholarly article on JSTOR where someone else did indeed find it odd that Scott messed up this attribution so badly, but also most of all helping me in my original quest to see whether I was the first one to write about this! I’m glad I’m not!

The text from the scholarly article reads in part:

He attributes this text to Suárez Miranda’s Viajes de varones prudentes (1658). As far as I know, however, this book was never written and its author did not exist. Nevertheless, the text Scott quotes does exist but only as part of a slightly longer fictional story written by Jorge Luis Borges titled “On Exactitude in Science.” (A footnote in the following chapter reveals that Scott has not read this story, but he knows through a colleague that Borges wrote one about maps.)

None of this would be that interesting if the subject here weren’t the idea of map detail and how it relates to “real life”. I’d like to think Scott put that error in on purpose (he definitely didn’t), up to and including that footnote a chapter later, as a playful nudge towards mindful acceptance that even the best books are maps, and all maps are lies.