Spider Story

In the 1890s reporter Ralph Delahaye Paine, famed young Yale rowing man breaking into journalism on the Philadelphia Press, was inspired to perpetrate a monumental hoax. With rich detail he told readers about one Pierre Grantaire who made a good living by raising and selling spiders for the spurious cobwebbing of wine bottles. After visiting the "spider farm" on Lancaster Pike outside Philadelphia, Reporter Paine said that 4,000 spiders of the species Nephila plumipes (who spun the "finest webs") were busy working for M. Grantaire, that he shipped them to customers in "little paper boxes, so many dozen in each crate." that the Queen spider was named "Sara Bernhardt," that her consort, fearsome "Emile Zola," was a specimen of the famed "bird-hunting spiders of Surinam." When M. Grantaire tapped on one of her filaments, Reporter Paine's straight-faced account continued, "Sara" ran up his finger for a fly, after which "the startling pet tripped back indoors with the booty."

Pleased with this yarn, Reporter Paine was further tickled when letters from hopeful investors asking M. Grantaire's address began to flood the Press office. Soon Mr. Paine grew accustomed to seeing his fabulous tale reprinted in unsophisticated journals under the heading "Scientific Notes" or "Nuggets of Fact." Back from the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Uprising, working on the New York Herald, Spiderman Paine had the fabrication brought to his attention again in 1902 when a plagiarist tried to sell it to him for publication in the Herald. Soon thereafter, Reporter Paine gave up newspaper work for fiction and became a successful author of novels, historical studies and stories for boys.

Though Mr. Paine forgot about it. the spider story continued to turn up here & there. Last year, the monthly Mechanics & Handicraft featured the story in its July number under the title "Webs for Sale." This time Pierre Grantaire was back in his native France, operating from a "little village in the department of the Loire."

Last week, the hoary hoax raised its head once more, in highly respectable surroundings, when readers of the June Atlantic Monthly spied the yarn as the leading article in the "Contributors' Club" department. The anonymous Atlantic contributor, borrowing many a phrase from the 40-year-old original, credited the spider farm to "my grandfather." Like all effective hoaxes, the spider story survived its creator. Ralph D. Paine died in 1925. His son and namesake is Business Editor of TIME.

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