Ripley's Believe It or Not!: Magic & Magicians

Toby Rupert was a librarian living in Toronto.

Here is more recycling of the “Believe It or Not” material. Ripley, of course, is now owned in Canada, and there are several museums and a TV show about the weirdness of people’s achievements. Three book series are also available, and these three books are the first entrants in each. From the “unexplained” series comes Magic and Magicians, dealing with black magic, dragons, fakirs, the floating ball trick, witches, wizards, Stonehenge, rope tricks, pyramids, sorcerers, and so forth, all eclectically presented and garishly illustrated (in both black and white and colour). But there is a fair bit of text as well. The Space book falls into the “Science” series, covering such topics as weather, video games, meteorites, moon buggy, radiation, robots, satellites, space junk, space shuttle (Canada’s space-arm is here), laser beams, cosmic rays, and computers. The Stuntmen book, in the “Entertainment” series, is perhaps the best of the lot: while it is mostly Hollywood, it does describe the life of a stuntman and it does describe some useful special effects that were used in Close Encounters, Star Wars, King Kong, Jaws, Towering Inferno, Airport, Alien, Ben Hur, Moonraker, The Phantom of the Opera, and other movies. Throughout all the books there is some Canadian content, but mostly the record is about such mundane and trivial things as “the pennies minted in the past ten years total 88 billion — placed edge to edge they would make over four paths to the moon.”