Part 1
Transcriber’s Notes
Text printed in the source document in italics, small capitals, bold face or blackletter have been transcribed _between underscores_, as ALL CAPITALS, =between equal signs= and ~between tildes~. ^x and ^{text} represent single and multiple character superscripts respectively. [signature] represent Ripley’s signature.
More Transcriber’s Notes may be found at the end of this text.
BELIEVE IT OR NOT----
Simon and Schuster [Illustration] Publisher·New York]
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY SIMON AND SCHUSTER, INC. 37 WEST 57TH STREET, NEW YORK AND ROBERT L. RIPLEY PRINTED IN U. S. A. BY MORTIMER-WALLING, INC., N. Y. BOUND BY H. WOLFF EST., N. Y.
1ST PRINTING, JANUARY, 1929 2ND PRINTING, JANUARY, 1929
BELIEVE IT OR NOT----
PREFACE
I make a living out of the fact that truth is stranger than fiction. The “Believe It or Not” pictures that appear in a hundred or so newspapers throughout the country are drawn according to that scale.
Yet, I venture to say that I have been called a liar more often than anybody in the world. Ordinarily when one is called a liar--well, to say the least, one feels hurt. (Sometimes it follows that somebody gets hurt.) But it is different with me. I do not mind it a bit. When I am called a liar by a reader of my cartoons I feel flattered! That short and ugly word is like music to my ears. I am complimented, because it means to me that my cartoon that day contained some strange fact that was unbelievable--and therefore most interesting, and that the reader did not know the truth when he saw it. That is the time when I always think of the comment made by Hamlet on a certain occasion:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I shall not forget the day my cartoon appeared with the illustrated statement that “Lindbergh was the sixty-seventh man to make a non-stop flight over the Atlantic Ocean.” Who would believe a statement like that? Three thousand wrote in to tell me that they did not. It is true, however. Who will believe that “a day is forty-eight hours long--not twenty-four”; “that Methuselah died before his father”; that “Buffalo Bill never shot a buffalo in his life”; that “a man died of old age before he was seven years old.” Can anybody be expected to believe that “a river runs backward”; “a flower eats mice”; “Napoleon crossed the Red Sea--as Moses did--on dry land”; “Fish climb trees,” etc.?
Those who “doubt truth to be a liar” may be forgiven. The mail brings about a thousand letters a week from readers hoping to catch me in error. Which they never do. (Well, hardly ever.)
Sometimes a reader is blinded by the shining countenance of truth and stumbles into error. Not long ago I printed a short sentence in one of my pictures that contained all the letters of the alphabet. This is it:
_John P. Brady gave me a black walnut box of quite a small size._
The next morning brought thirteen letters pointing out that I had left the letter “F” out of the sentence. Now, there was no mistake on my part--all the letters of the alphabet, including the letter “F” were in that sentence, but what a strange thing it was that thirteen readers failed to find it and that each of them thought the same letter was missing.
The first “Believe It or Not” cartoon was an accident.
I had been drawing cartoons for the sports pages for some time when, in the course of a day’s work, I hurriedly put together a few athletic oddities that happened to be lying on my desk and made them up into a cartoon--never for a moment expecting that it meant any more than a day’s work done ... and for the want of a better caption I called it “Believe It or Not.”
It appeared the next day in the old New York Globe, and much to my surprise there was considerable comment about it. The editor of the paper suggested that I make another one if I “could gather together enough stunts.” A week later I had enough facts for another one, and it seemed to be more popular than my usual run of cartoons. Thereafter I made a “Believe It or Not” cartoon a week. A year later, I made two a week, and soon the demand came that I make one every day. Now it looks as though I will never do anything else. And I don’t care if I do.
I would like to answer the common question:
“_Where do you get all the strange things that you draw about?_”
Everywhere, all the time.
Here and there--day and night; through observation, conversation, and edification. I am constantly searching--everywhere all the time.
Travel, of course, is an unfailing source of oddities--“The world’s mine oyster.” Once or twice each year I venture forth to foreign lands for pearls to string in the “Believe It or Not” columns of the newspapers. I have traveled in sixty-four different countries, and hope to see them all before I am through. (Oh, yes, there are more than sixty-four countries.)
Sometimes suggestions are sent in to me, but, unfortunately, the usable ones are rare. Someday I hope to meet James Waldo Fawcett, of New York, Doc Applegate, of Ogallala, Neb., and J. Dennis Butler, of Alameda, Cal., and thank them for their interesting contributions. They are among the few who know what is interesting to people other than themselves.
I have been drawing the “Believe It or Not” pictures for eight years and find that it grows easier each day. There is no danger of running out of material (as some readers think): the supply is inexhaustible.
“This world is all a fleeting show, For man’s illusion given.”
I have enough “queeriosities” on hand to make a hundred cartoons, and a library of strange facts and curious bits of knowledge enough to fill several books like this one. (A fair warning!)
[signature]
CONTENTS
PAGE
Preface i
The Ghats of the Ganges 2
The Burning Ghat 5
The Sun Gazer 7
Buried Alive 8
The Bed of Nails 9
The Ever-Standing Men 10
Human Inch-Worms 10
A Pound of Feathers Weighs More Than Pound of Gold 14
A Gallon of Vinegar Weighs More in the Winter than in the Summer 14
The Boy Who Died of Old Age Before He Was 7 Years Old 15
The Longest Fight 16
The Man Who Was “Seen” to Death 17
Henry Lewis Playing Billiards With His Nose 17
The Clock of Heaven 18
Punishment by Proxy 18
Making Whoopee! 18
The King’s English 18
Bye! Bye! Black Sheep 18
What’s In a Name 18
All the Names of God Have Four Letters 20
David Rice Atchison Was President of the United States 21
The River of Vinegar 23
The Boy With Owl Eyes 23
The Base-Stealing Record 23
One Hundred Years--and a Day 25
The First Hundred Centuries Are the Hardest 25
Convicted of Killing Himself 26
The Sting of Death 26
The Man Who Hanged Himself 26
Life Is Like That 26
“To Err Is Human--” 28
Christ Was _Not_ Born in the First Year of the Christian Era 30
Aesop Did _Not_ Write “Aesop’s Fables” 30
Nero Did _Not_ Fiddle While Rome Burned 30
The Needle of the Compass Does _Not_ Point to the North Pole 30
The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is _Not_ a Straight Line 30
Napoleon--Like Moses--Crossed the Red Sea On Dry Land 31
Selling the World 32
The Golden Man 33
The Walking Half-Moons 34
Commodus Fought and Won 1,031 Battles 38
Lindbergh Was the Sixty-Seventh Man to Make a Non-Stop Flight Over the Atlantic Ocean 39
Present--But Not Voting 40
Pain? You Don’t Know What Pain Is 42
Guyal Vaca Segual--Fire Eater 42
The Horned Kaffir 44
The Square Palindrome 45
Damned Clever, These Chinese 46
Methuselah--Oldest Man in the Bible--Died Before His Father 48
Coghlan’s Coffin 49
The Human Pin Cushion 53
The Luckiest Man Alive 54
Silent for 30 Years 54
“3,675 Feet and 9 Inches” 54
The Sun That Rises in the Pacific and Sets in the Atlantic 55
Bootlegging Human Heads 59
“Be Fruitful, and Multiply, and Replenish the Earth” 61
Mulai Ismail the Father of 888 Children 61
The Nine-Year-Old Mother 63
The Eight-Year-Old Mother 63
The Ninety-Year-Old Mother 63
The Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather 64
The Oldest Parents in the World 65
The Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandmother 65
Three Children in Three Centuries 65
The Mother of 69 Children 66
Business for the Pied Piper 66
The Progressive Mother 67
You Can’t Beat the Dutch 67
The Largest Number of Children a Woman Ever Had 68
An Indian Juggler’s Remarkable Feat 71
“Words, Words, Words” 72
The 1792 Family 73
Epigram Upon Nothing 74
Can You Punctuate This Sentence? 74
“That” Word Used 7 Times in Succession 74
It’s the Katz 74
The Longest Word in the World 76
There Are 58,366,440 Different Ways of Spelling the Word “Scissors” 76
The Author Who Never Read a Book 76
An American Palindrome 78
The Mental Marvel 79
Hot Lips 80
Pillar Saints 81
Two Scandinavians Rowed Across the Atlantic Ocean 84
Wedded for 147 Years 85
The Land of the Humming Birds 86
Jim Corbett Fought in the Prize Ring for 18 Years 88
The Fish That Climb Trees 89
Red Rain 90
The Barking Bird 92
The Shark Destroyer 92
Man-Eating Clams 92
Pranks of Nature 93
The Child Cyclops 93
The Transparent Man 94
The Crab-Toed Tribe 94
Yogi Haridas 95
The Fork-Tongued Fräulein 96
The Glass Snake 96
The Left-Handed Family 96
The Man Family 96
The Half Woman 98
The Double-Eyed Man 99
The Man Without Ears 99
The Family Physicians 100
Lion-Hearted 100
The Dusty Ocean 101
Raining Fishes and Frogs 102
The Red Sea 102
Manna from Heaven 103
Whistling Trees 103
Shirts Growing On Trees 103
Oysters Growing On Trees 104
The Cow Tree 104
The Wingless Bird 105
The Ways of Spelling Shakespeare 106
Nature’s Marksman 109
Golf Birdies 109
Burning Anger 109
Figures Don’t Lie 110
Can You Write the Answer? 112
Magic Seven 112
Can You Change Five Dollars? 113
Palindromatic Figures 113
The 100 Symbols 114
The Persistent Number 115
The Largest Prime Known 115
Magic Squares 116
“Pi” 117
One Problem Never Proved 117
Kaspar Hauser Could See the Stars In the Daytime 118
Babe Ruth Hit 125 Home Runs In One Hour 119
The Handy Letter Writer 120
The Book Worm 120
A Beaver’s Dam 120
“The Place of Drunkenness” 121
The Ideal Landlord 121
A Week With Two Thursdays 121
Enduring Fame 121
The Bobbing Island 121
The Fig-Tree Tomb 123
Sidis--the Prodigy 123
The Illiterate Calculator 123
The Giraffe Girl 124
God’s Heaven 126
The Vocal Memnon 128
The King Who Was Crowned Before He Was Born 130
The 153-Year-Old Bridegroom 131
The Eyeless Infant 132
The Lyre Bird 132
Singing Sands 134
Oysters That Catch Mice 136
A Billion Dollars in London is Worth a Thousand Times as Much as a Billion Dollars in New York 137
A Spider is Not an Insect 137
St. Patrick was Not an Irishman 137
Buffalo Bill Never Shot a Buffalo in His Life 138
Sex Appeal 139
“The Queen of Spain Has No Legs” 139
The Note of a Suicide 139
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived 141
The Crawling Fish 141
The Hard-Riding Squire 141
The Tracer Bullet 142
German Insect Power 142
A Remarkable Runner 143
Catching the Same Fish Twice 145
“One Long Hop” 145
A Queen Crowned After Death 146
The Kaiserpokal 148
A Cough in the Car Load 148
Hot Dog 148
Flaming Youth 148
“O P Q R S T” 148
George Washington Was _Not_ the First President of the United States 149
The Hen that Became a Rooster 149
The Man of Chains 151
A Fleet Captured by Cavalry 151
“If You Would See His Monument Look Around” 151
Mother Goose 151
The Ghost Ship 152
What Price Privacy 152
T I P 152
He Who Laughed Last 152
A Year and a Day 152
The Shortest Poem in the World 153
Even Up 153
It’s Not the Heat--It’s the Humidity 153
The Morning After 153
Jakuck Weather Report 153
The Fountain of Blood 153
A Comma that Saved a Human Life 155
The Mental Freak 158
The Will of Akbar the Great 158
Easy Come Easy Go 158
The Cruise of the Skeletons 159
The Man Who Drank Himself to Death 159
A Good Listener 159
The Penitent Eye 160
The Last Nod of Homer 160
Fare Enough 160
What Is so Rare as This Day in June 160
The Loudest Noise Ever Heard 162
The Earth Moves in Three Different Directions at the Same Time 162
“The Holy Roman Empire” 162
Pa’s a Sap 162
The Blessed Isles 164
The Boozing Bishop 164
The One-Armed Paper Hanger 164
The River That Runs Backwards 164
A Square Egg 164
The World’s Worst Thug 166
Heaven Only Knows 166
Solving the Servant Problem 166
The Man With the Golden Nose 168
An Empress’s Agile Ears 168
Friday Unlucky? 168
Fire Water 170
The Cheese Champion 170
Whoopee 170
A Record to Be Sneezed At 170
The Fiji Fire-Walkers 171
The $4,412,000-a-Year Man 172
The $2,000,000 Comma 172
Mammy! 172
The Last Will of Rabelais 172
FULL PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Upside-Down Man 3
An Ever-Standing Man 11
A Hindoo Urdhabahu 12
A Football Game; A Pumpkin; A Wounded Soldier; A Cat and a Rat 19
River of Vinegar; Boy With Owl Eyes; A Lemon; Jimmy Johnston 22
Jean Baptiste Mouron Was a Galley Slave for 100 Years and a Day 24
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans; Duke Farrell; Paul Hubert 27
Inca Atahuallpa; Fishermen of El Gran Chaco 36
Morimoto; The Murder at Midnight 43
Bootlegging Human Heads 58
Magdelaine--Charlotte--Jacquette--Renaud 62
An Indian Juggler 70
H. B. Applegate’s Boat; The Rubaiyat; Soveski of Stanford University, Sultan of Djocjockarte 77
Simon of the Pillar 82
Red Snow; Emmett French; A Letter Delivered 64 Years Late 91
The Fork-Tongued Fräulein; Sigmund Klein; H. Hanson; London’s Honking Pedestrian; The Glass Snake 97