When I was young and visited my grandparents home in Elgin I loved the room with the books. It was off the dining room and while the adults played poker at the dining room table the kids played with toys or read books in the book room. They had only a few books that kids would like, most were my grandfather’s books with titles like “Have Gun, Will Shoot”.

While I liked the Rupert Bear annual from maybe the 1930s, I always gravitated to the huge Ripley’s Believe it or Not book. First printed in 1929, it held illustrated stories of the strange, the next to impossible, the macabre. In its pages I learned about the man with two-foot-long fingernails, that Saint Patrick was not an Irishman, and I learned about shrunken heads. To this day I think about this book when reading clickbait headlines on the Internet.

My delight in this book was tempered with a small bit of shame. It seemed naughty reading this book and looking at the illustrations which were often off-putting. Close-ups of people, like the illustration of the actor who could make his hair stand on end or the man who buried his head in the sand for 9 hours.

And while thumbing through the book I came across something that I repeated to people as true fact throughout my childhood. I’d completely forgotten about until just now.

Maybe every era had its fake news…