Jun. 11th, 2018
Reread rushthatspeaks’ post from a few years back on Daniel Pinkwater, and the follow-up conversation on which of the odder things in his books various readers had subsequently discovered were real. TV Tropes calls this phenomenon “Aluminum Christmas Trees” and mentions Pinkwater’s work by name as containing many. An Aluminum Christmas Tree, as defined by Tv Tropes, is not quite the same thing as the Tiffany Problem – it won’t necessarily strike the reader as an anachronism, just as a weird thing that’s clearly part of the fictional story they are reading; later they discover it’s one of the bits of the story that was based on reality.