Yes, Paper Towns Are Real, and They Are Fascinating

Paper Towns may not feel like a sequel to The Fault in Our Stars (though it does have a link or two), but the John Green adaptation does give us a lot to think about (and what's maybe the best soundtrack of the year). One of the surprises of the John Hughes-inspired high school movie is that it's also a road trip movie — main character Q (Nat Wolff) gathers his friends to find his enigmatic dream girl Margo (Cara Delevingne). The destination? A paper town, just like the film's namesake. Green himself first learned of the phenomenon of paper towns — fake cities printed on maps to prevent map plagiarism — on a road trip with his girlfriend in South Dakota. So in case you were wondering, yes, paper towns are real, and in fact, Agloe, the town mentioned in the film, is real as well. Here's more about Agloe and other famous "paper towns."

(Warning: movie spoiler ahead.) In the movie, Q pinpoints Margo's location to Agloe, in upstate New York. When he gets "there" — an interesting concept in itself because by definition, there should be no there there — he finds an abandoned building. Even though Agloe is just supposed to be a name printed on a map, the real Agloe in upstate New York does have a building marking its location. Or did — and it was at the center of a copyright battle. Created in the 1930s, Agloe was one of the first paper towns, its name an anagram of the initials of Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest Alpers of General Drafting Company. Then in the 1950s, Agloe General Store was built, its owners taking that name because they had seen the name on a map. So when rival mapmakers Rand McNally put Agloe on their maps, General Drafting Company threatened to sue, knowing the presence of their paper town incriminated Rand McNally. Except Rand McNally's defense was that they knew of Agloe General Store, and the claim was dropped. Oh, the irony.

Michigan has two paper towns: Goblu and Beatosu, and if you look closely, you'll get it (or if you're a Michigan fan). In 1978, Michigan's State Highway Commission chairman Peter Fletcher had a cartographer add those two fake towns to the state maps. They reference "Go Blue" (the rallying cry for Michigan State) and "Beat OSU" (Ohio State University being Michigan's rival). Guess who Fletcher rooted for?