Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! - Ripley’s Believe It or Not!: In Celebration... A special reissue of the original!

From the Reviews of Believe It or Not!

With greater ingenuity, a more intensive search of the literature of wonders than Poe, and an almost equal fidelity to fact, RIPLEY gives us page after page of facts which the average reader will receive with a gasp of disbelief.

The Saturday Review of Literature

When a reviewer gives the 16th hour of a 16-hour working day to reading Believe It Or Not! and when he stays up an extra hour to finish it, you know it must be fascinating.

The San Francisco News

There are not enough adjectives in the English language to praise Believe It Or Not! It is a book that must be read to be appreciated; it is a book that should be bound in leather and saved for the future generations to read. Were it priced at $100. a volume the reader would not regret the purchase.

JOHN L. STANARD
in The Chattanooga Times

Ripley has retained the open searching eye of the child and he sees amazing thingssome of them under the very noses of good folk who never see them at all... He is as much an enemy of complacency as Voltaire ever was. If you dont believe it, run through Believe It Or Not!

WALTER YUST in The Philadelphia Public Ledger

One of the most delightful books on the market at the moment is the recently issued Simon and Schuster publication, Believe It Or Not! by ROBERT L. RIPLEY,a compilation of that diligent cartoonist-authors astonishing research into the annals of modern and ancient lore, all tending to substantiate the sage observation that truth, sometimes, is stranger than fiction.

Variety

Believe It Or Not! is an excellent piece of work. RIPLEY, who is alone in his field, amuses and startles you in turn in this book of fascinating facts. I unhesitatingly recommend Believe It Or Not! as one of the most interesting books I have ever read.

MARK HELLINGER
in The New York Daily News

Believe It Or Not! is a book extremely difficult to put aside. It is one of the most fascinating volumes we have seen in monthsa book full of strange, weird and unbelievable facts, accompanied by excellent drawings by the author.

The New York Sun

IMPORTANT NOTE

This book is the first of a series. Mr Ripley has enough material for at least a dozen more, and at the present time is whipping into shape a second volume containing more of his incredible and stimulating memorabiliaconcerning the phenomena of mankind.

H ERE are a myriad of wonder tales set down in cold print by ROBERT L. RIPLEY, the amazing traveller who has traversed sixty-nine countries in search of the almost unbelievable material now incorporated within the covers of this book. He can prove every statement he makes. Here he tells his incredible stories of man-eating clams, the barking bird, oysters that catch mice; here he describes the whistling trees and fountain of blood; here he talks with you about the Ever-Standing Men and Upside-Down Men of Benares; he introduces you to a woman who has sixty-three husbands, one who had sixty-nine children, and a wholesale father who was the proud possessor of 548 sons and 340 daughters! You will find your old favoritesand some new puzzlerswhich MR. RIPLEY has uncorked now for the first time. Believe It Or Not!this volume contains a thousand new things under the sun!

T HIS is the book that started it all for the Ripley publishing dynasty in 1929. You hold in your hand an exact reprinting of the first Robert Ripley book. It was released to great acclaim and was an immediate hit, selling more than 500,000 copies. Since then, hundreds of different Believe it or Not! books have been published. Today, if every Believe it or Not! book ever printed, was stacked one upon another, the pile would be nearly 200 times taller than New York Citys 1,454-foot tall Empire State Building.

The re-release of this 1929 landmark publication is only part of the 75th Anniversary celebration of the companys publishing ventures. An all-new, full color, Believe it or Not! has also been published, the biggest and best one yet!

Robert Ripley himself predicted the long and illustrious publishing history of the Believe it or Not! brand. In the preface to the original, Ripley closed by noting, There is no danger of running out of material; the supply is inexhaustible. I have.....a library of strange facts and curious bits of knowledge enough to fill several books like this one. (A fair warning!) Ripley died in 1949, and today his quest for the weird and unusual rests in the caring hands of Ripley Entertainments worldwide staff of curious and spirited researchers and showmen.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT

Copyright 2004 by Ripley Entertainment Inc.
All rights reserved. Ripleys, Believe It or Not!, and Ripleys Believe It or Not!
are registered trademarks of Ripley Entertainment Inc.

No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to VP Intellectual Property, Ripley Entertainment Inc., Suite 188, 7576 Kingspointe Parkway, Orlando, Florida 32819

Library of Congress Control Number: 2004096481

ISBN: 1-893951-09-X
ISBN: 978-1-6099-1041-9 (eBook)

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 liarwell, 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 unbelievableand 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 longnot 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 Seaas Moses didon 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 partall 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.