Before me were small sheets that had been cut from newspapers, stacked side by side in a thick double pile. The cartoon atop the left stack was titled “Believe It or Not!” and I recognized it as Ripley’s moniker. The one on the right was titled “Scott’s Scrap Book,” which I had never heard of and found more intriguing.
A newspaper reader from long ago had carefully clipped both cartoons likely for reference. That was not surprising given their content. Back them, Ripley’s and Scott’s educated people about the strange, the odd and the imaginative that was actually real:
A man in turkey said to be 140 years old – from the Ripley illustration at auction.
A 28-inch tall man brought to the United States in 1881 by Barnum and Bailey Circus as a sideshow feature – from Scott’s.
The stacks of cut-out cartoons/illustrations were in the bottom half of a small cardboard box in a glass display case at the auction house. Flipping through them, I saw that most were copies of Scott’s Scrap Book, drawn by a man named R.J. Scott (first name Roland).
He was a cartoonist who was born in Indianapolis in 1886 and worked first at the local newspaper. He later joined the staffs at several other midwestern newspapers. He moved to Arizona in the early 1920s, moved away for a while and later returned. He lived in Arizona until he retired in 1967. Scott died in 1968.
He created a newspaper cartoon series called “Sally’s Sallies,” which focused on women. Sally’s was the first of his syndicated newspaper series; it was started in 1926 and lasted for 41 years. Scott began drawing Scrap Book in 1931 but with a title that was a mouthful: “Did You Know? The Illustrated Question Box.” The title was changed a year later. Like Sally’s, Scrap Book also ran until 1967.
Scrap Book was a “catch-all collection of tidbits covering pretty much anything in the world of science, history, nature, and strange customs. In other words, a feature similar to Ripley’s Believe it Or Not,” as described by an archivist for King Features, which syndicated the cartoon.
Scott’s series began years after Robert Ripley created his newspaper cartoons/illustrations of the unusual in 1918. First titled “Champs and Chumps” – and soon changed to “Believe It or Not” – it was immensely popular. The brand morphed into a major worldwide enterprise of the odd, the unusual, the strange.
Sally’s and Scrap Book were not Scott’s first cartoons. He produced one called “Mr. Lose-Out” early in his career in Indianapolis, and illustrated a column titled “Just Among Us Girls” in the 1920s. He also did courtroom sketches and editorial cartoons.
Some of Scott’s newspaper panels for Scrap Book and Sally’s from 1960-1967 are in the collection at Special Collections Research Center at Syracuse University Libraries.
Here are a sampling of the newspaper cartoons from the auction:
