The Liar's Liar

Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Baron von Münchhausen, served as a cavalry officer in the Russian Imperial Army during the Russo-Turkish War. He was, by all accounts, genuinely brave. He was also the best dinner guest in eighteenth-century Hanover, famous for telling stories of such magnificent exaggeration that travelling noblemen made special detours to hear him perform.

Then someone stole his act.

In 1785, a slim book appeared in London. Forty-nine pages, sold for a shilling, recounting the Baron's tales of riding cannonballs and pulling himself from a swamp by his own hair. The author was anonymous. He was also Rudolf Erich Raspe, a former Fellow of the Royal Society who had fled Germany a decade earlier after being caught stealing gems from the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. A wanted thief had appointed himself the authority on lying.

The book was translated into three languages within a year. Raspe never faced consequences for the book. He moved to Scotland, ran a mining fraud so brazen it later inspired a character in Walter Scott, and died in an unmarked grave in Ireland after being caught salting a copper mine with imported ore.

You really could not invent a more appropriate biographer.

The Baron, meanwhile, became the most famous liar in Europe. He sued the wrong person and lost. He hired servants whose sole job was to turn visitors away at the door.

He never stopped telling the stories. He just stopped letting anyone in to hear them.