No Speed Bumps

Robert Ripley's 'Believe It Or Not!'

As a kid, I was for a time (oh yeah, not now?!) totally absorbed by Ripley's Believe It Or Not!. Among other things - promise!

Though initially a newspaper cartoon (from 1918 on), I came into contact with the Guru of the Unexpected in book form, being collections the cartoons, I now suspect - tho I was unaware of this at the time. The books I had were in a pen drawn format:

Though their style varied, according to the era:



I read and re-read these compendia till the pages were yellow with age. And in the end knew most of the detail by heart.

I'm a bit at a loss to know what it was about Ripley that took my fantasy - apart from the obvious. As I hit my teenage years, I became a bit embarassed by being the local expert of all things weird (tho wonderful). And finally, I think, I genuinely lost interest - or other stuff took over.

And then there was 'Life between Ripley and Now'.

Curiously, it was only recently I had any sense of scale of the early 'Believe It Or Not' phenomenon - when I saw the scale of the pavilion at the Chicago World Fair of 1933-4:


Of course no post about Ripley would be complete without a photo of the great man himself, titled, as you'd expect, 'Mr Robert Ripley and Friend':


By the way, all these photos of huge cocks are genuine:







Believe it or not!