Jill Lepore: Robert Ripley and His World: The New Yorker Robert L. Ripley, who was heavyset and dainty, wore his dark widow's peak slicked back flat and had teeth so jutting and crooked that, until he got some of them yanked out and straighter fakes jammed back in (which hurt like hell), he looked remarkably like a vampire. He had a girlfriend called Okie and a dog named Dokie. Among his prized possessions was a bullet that a man had coughed up forty-nine years after being shot in the chest. Ripley travelled all over the world to collect what he called "queeriosities": the skull of a Tibetan man, the shrunken head of an Ecuadoran woman, the penis of a whale. "Has a fish that swims backward," Geoffrey T. Hellman wrote of Ripley in his notebook when he interviewed him for a Profile, in The New Yorker, in 1940. That wasn't the screwiest thing in Hellman's jumble of notes about Ripley's quirks. Consider: "Likes to polish totem poles." Or: "Loves outwitting Armenian rug merchants." Then, there's the fact, reported by Hellman, that Ripley - a fifty-year-old bachelor at the time - was happiest when wearing nothing but his bathrobe and his dead mother's wedding ring. "Doesn't like to work w clothes on," Hellman noted. Ripley was fabulously wealthy. He stored his treasures in three houses, and the overflow on a fifty-six-foot-long red-yellow-and-blue Chinese junk. Still, even the man who has everything is not without his little foibles. "Cant drive a car," Hellman jotted down in his notebook. Has a horror of freaks. Ripley's catchphrase, "Believe It or Not!," came with its own punctuation, lest the requisite enthusiasm prove unforthcoming. Believe It or Not! was also the name of Ripley's corporation, headquartered in New York, on East Forty-fifth Street; of his radio show, broadcast coast to coast on a national network; of his movie shorts, produced by Warner Bros.; and of his best-selling books, published by Simon & Schuster. But, before all that, "Believe It or Not!" was the title of Ripley's cartoons and comic strips, printed in three hundred and twenty-five newspapers in thirty-eight countries and seventeen languages. Hellman, in his notes, summed up his subject: "Probly best known man in world." . . .