Inscribed by the Author
Ripley's Big Book Believe It or Not! Two Volumes in One.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934.
Full Description:
RIPLEY, Robert L.. Ripley's Big Book Believe It or Not!. Two Volumes in One. New York: Simon & Schuster, [1934].
First collected edition, later issue (12th printing). This edition was the first time the two volumes were published together in one comprising Ripley's Belive It or Not!of 1929 and The New Believe It or Not! of 1931. Inscribed by Ripley on the front free endpaper "To/Marie Atkinson/With All Good Wishes!/RLRipley/'Belive it or not../N.Y./1942" Large octavo (9 1/4 x 6 1/4 inches; 235 x 157 mm). [2], xx, 361, [1, blank] pp.
Publisher's full orange cloth, lettered in black on front board and spine. Some minimal wear to board edges. Some toning to endpapers, touching a few letters of the inscription. In the original pictorial dust jacket. Jacket with some dust soiling to rear panel. Some chips and wear to jacket edges and spine extremities. A one-inch tear to top of back panel. Fold at front flap with some splitting. Price on back flap is inked out. Still a very good jacket and a near fine book.
"This is Ripley's big book. It contains all of the material of his two books which together sold for $4.00. Its pages are crammed with a legion of fantastic facts about the world we live in." (Front flap).
"Ripley, Robert LeRoy (26 Dec. 1893-27 May 1949), cartoonist and creator of the newspaper feature "Believe-It-or-Not,"... in 1923, Ripley started drawing the feature for the Evening Post. In 1929 a book-length selection of his drawings and sketches published by Simon and Schuster was so quickly and widely a bestseller that William Randolph Hearst directed his King Features Syndicate to immediately sign up Ripley for national distribution. Ripley began, as he said, "drawing real oddities from the whole world... Ripley's syndicated cartoon feature was published in 326 papers, in thirty-eight countries, and in seventeen languages. By the late 1930s he had a net annual income of $500,000." (American Dictionary of National Biography).
HBS 69688.
$1,200.
Price: $1,250.00
Item #69688