Product Description This Encyclopedia Forteana anthologizes the cult heros four classic works on the strange, the unexplained, and the just plain weird: The Book of the Damned, Lo!, Wild Talents, and New Lands. It features Forts complete, unabridged text and a subject index.
Here are the four books that invented our understanding of the paranormal. These are cult hero Charles Forts defining records of bizarre, haunting, strange, and inexplicable facts for which science cannot account: Frogs falling from the skies. Mysterious airships in an age before flight. Monsters. Poltergeists. Floating islands. Teleportation (a term Fort invented).
These are the works that moved novelist Theodore Dreiser to write: To me no one in the world has suggested the underlying depths and mysteries and possibilities as has Fort. To me he is simply stupendous.
Now, Forts classic investigations are newly collected with a preface by biographer Jim Steinmeyer. Complete with a full subject index, here is the definitive Fort anthology for our times.
Customer Reviews:
Philosophy of the WeirdJune 30, 2008 I too must disagree with the reviewer who finds Fort a difficult read. Fort wrote to a different literary standard. Enjoying Fort is a matter of adjustment. Otherwise, Fort's often convoluted and occasionally obfuscated style hides a wicked sense of humor and a visionary sense of wonder. When one puts Fort's underlying message, that the universe is a single construct and that everything is related, into the context that Fort wrote half a century before such ideas became widespread, Fort's genius begins to shine.
The sheer volume of research represented by this compendium is astonishing. And it is clear that Fort not only gathered odd reports, but contemplated them extensively as well.
This is a classic must-read that should be standard high school fare.
Mammoth Compendium of Fortean LoreJune 9, 2008 3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I feel obliged to disagree with the previous reviewer. Fort is not hard to read, in fact quite the opposite, but he is a product of a different era. Therefore, his work should be read for what it is - a massive collection of tabloid-esque miscellanea, liberally salted with Fort's trademark cynicism, humor and wit. You could just as easily flip through it and get sucked into the more interesting parts as you could read the whole bloody things through word for word, and you'd still come out at the same place. There really isn't a lot of linear plot or anything going on here. In fact, for those of the younger generations, you might be tempted to think of it as something of a blog, and in a sense, thats really what Fort did.
For those not in the know, the late Charles Fort was a compiler of oddities - teleportation, spontaneous human combustion, poltergeists, UFOs, out-of-place animals and of course, frogs falling from the sky during storms (a phenomena which he attributed to floating "Sargasso Seas" in the sky which sucked in, and occasionally dropped off, all manner of lost objects - not just frogs, in fact). Fort essentially criticized the presumption that humans can ever truly know or define the universe, and his work could be described as pseudo-scientific, but then you also should take it with a grain of salt. After all, he is credited with saying something along the lines that he never believed anything, especially not what he had written himself. Typical Fortean humor at it's best, and a good word of advice in general. All in all, theres over a thousand pages chock full of enough general weirdness to keep even the wackiest cranks happy... at least for a while.
So what's in this monumental work? The complete works of Charles Fort, four books in all - The Book of the Damned, Lo!, New Lands and Wild Talents. It's all more or less the same so it doesn't much matter what order you read them in (if any). I spent many an hour fondly flipping through my old Dover edition of his collected works, so I was very happy when my girlfriend presented me with this new copy (with a fancy new cover and everything!). If you are interested in UFOs, paranormal phenomena, psychic powers and other weird stuff in general, you almost certainly need to read Fort. He is at the cornerstone of all modern paranormal and pseudo-scientific "research." Indeed, his name has even been adopted by the popular (and bizarre) Fortean Times magazine. So Fort is a great example of bizarre pop culture Americana and should definately be read by anyone interested in the bizarre, strange or otherworldly. I mean, this is the guy who coined the term "teleportation!" Need I say much more?
Furthermore, the one thing I WILL agree with our previous reviewer on is that you can find much more background on Fort and his life in Knight's recent biography, "Charles Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained," as well as the aforementioned Jim Steinmeyer book. However, nothing compares to the biting wit of Fort himself, no matter how fun of a read it may be.
Hard to EndureMay 31, 2008 1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm giving a lower rating not for Fort's ideas, his research, or the presentation of these collected works. I'm giving it a low rating because, even as a reasonably educated and well-rounded individual, I find Fort's written work almost impossible to read. I shouldn't say impossible; I should say "more mental effort than I'm willing to exert on something I was only willing to read for amusement". I've never really been exposed to the man's actual writings before, although I had heard the term "Fortean", but suffice it to say that Fort's writing style is atrocious and his ability to communicate intelligibly and coherently is almost nonexistant. I am interested in the things he was trying to write about, but trying to wade through his sins against language to extract the accounts of interesting and unexplained phenomena is such a tedious chore that you won't want to bother. For a man who apparently made his living as a writer, the way he actually writes is most absurd and ridiculous. Grammatical and sentence structure conventions of any kind are largely ignored. The idea that Fort was a writer is like some kind of century old joke. Never has reading a book ostensibly written in English been so torturous and unpleasant for me, and I naively expected it to be lite reading at that.
Although I don't know this for a certainty, I suspect the new Fort biography by Jim Steinmeyer compiles and makes intelligible the interesting bits of information from Fort's works and makes him reasonably accessible to us mere mortals. Excuse my ignorance, but how anybody ever trudged through these atrocious writings in the first place to discover what in the world Fort was rambling on about and give him any acclaim or credence is a miracle I'll never understand. I would suggest anyone else new to Fort try Steinmeyer's book first and only come back to this one if the grueling and unpleasant reading experience is really worth it to you just to glean some century-old Ripley/P.T. Barnum type curiosities.
