What do a haunted house, a woman who gave birth to rabbits, and a man climbing into a regularly sized wine bottle have in common? All are hoaxes birthed in the 1700s and clearly examined by Ian Keable in his new book The Century of Deception: The Birth of the Hoax in Eighteenth Century England. Keable devotes each of ten chapters to one hoax, which he introduces, presents, and then carefully analyzes. There is a 67-page PDF of notes at centuryofdeception.com, but the book itself includes a chapter-by-chapter bibliography on recent scholarship, as well as some references to primary sources in-text.
Keable says that he selected the ten hoaxes from among many others of the century because they were the most well-known at the time (though his chapters suggest that two of them may not have been widely viewed as such at the time). For comparison, I checked the index of seven recent or common books on hoaxes. (Two are commonly reprinted classic texts, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by MacKay (1841, 1932) and Hoaxes by MacDougall (1940, 1958); two are reference books published in 1993: Hoaxes and Scams by Sifakis and Encyclopedia of Hoaxes, edited by Stein; and three are relatively recent popular books, A Treasury of Deception by Farquar (2005), Bunk by Young (2017) and Hoax by Tattersall and Nevraumont (2018). I reviewed the latter two in SKEPTIC 24.1 in 2019.