Hellman's Mayo

… You could turn Hellman’s brilliantly witty twenty-thousand word Profiles into one-liners: “When he is not with close friends, Le Corbusier often displays a lively sense of his own importance,” or “Knopf is at once Olympian and dressy; few literary men can stare him down.” But a more sensible way to spend an afternoon would be to drive a spike into your head.

“Odd Man,” Hellman’s Profile of Ripley, begins like this:

The consuming passion of Robert L. Ripley, whose “Believe It or Not” cartoons daily widen the horizon of some sixty million people, is to become a citizen of the world in the largest geographical sense of the word.

By the time Hellman met him, Ripley had visited two hundred and one countries out of a possible two hundred and fifty-three. “Germany’s expansion has confused him,” Hellman wrote, ruefully. “If Hitler continues to swallow up territory at his recent rate, in a few years Ripley may even be in a position to state truthfully that he has visited more countries than exist.”