The Fortean Collection: the Five Surviving Books of Charles Fort

The Fortean Collection is comprised of all five existing books by Charles Fort, THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED, NEW LANDS, LO!, WILD TALENTS, and his only novel THE OUTCAST MANUFACTURERS. The Outcast Manufacturers is the only published novel by Charles Fort. Fort wrote ten novels, though only one, The Outcast Manufacturers was published in 1909 and was later serialized in the American edition of Pearson's Magazine. Only five chapters were published in Pearson's. The Book of the Damned deals with various types of anomalous phenomena including UFOs, strange falls of both organic and inorganic materials from the sky, odd weather patterns, the possible existence of creatures generally held to be mythological, disappearances of people under strange circumstances, and many other phenomena, the book is historically considered to be the first written in the specific field of anomalistics. The title of the book referred to what he termed the "damned" data - data which had been damned, or excluded, by modern science because of its not conforming to accepted guidelines. Wild Talents recounts a wide variety of odd phenomena, Fort largely disregards his previous teleportation theory. Rather than a vague "Cosmic joker", as he postulated in his earlier books, the responsibility for these occurrences are freak powers that occur in the human mind, that cannot be naturally developed, but are there as a sort of throwback to primeval times. New Lands deals primarily with astronomical anomalies. Fort expands in this book on his theory about the Super-Sargasso Sea - a place where earthly things supposedly materialize in order to rain down on Earth - as well as developing an idea that there are continents above the skies of Earth. Lo! was details a wide range of unusual phenomena. In the final chapter of the book he proposes a new cosmology that the earth is stationary in space and surrounded by a solid shell which is (in the book's final words) ".. not unthinkably far away." Charles Fort's parade of scientific anomalies frames the larger anomaly that is human existence. Charles Hoy Fort was an American writer and researcher into anomalous phenomena. Today, the terms Fortean and Forteana are used to characterize various such phenomena.