Reading and filing
Born in Albany, New York, in 1874, Fort tried his hand at journalism and fiction. The novelist Theodore Dreiser became his friend and supported his writing. Fort’s working materials increasingly came from newspapers, scientific journals and the hours he spent in reading rooms. In the 1920s he moved to London for a time to use the British Museum’s collections.
Fort copied observations onto slips and sorted them by subject, an activity whose physical scale survives in the trays of notes preserved among Tiffany Thayer’s papers. A secondhand report could travel a considerable distance in this system, from its original observer through an editor and a periodical to a new place in Fort’s files.
The excluded in print
The Book of the Damned appeared in December 1919. The library copy is the second printing, issued in February 1920. Its opening imagines excluded observations marching past like a procession. Fort’s wit depends on the contrast between the confidence of an accepted explanation and the awkward detail that refuses to fit it. His book records both the reported phenomena and an author’s sometimes extravagant attempts to imagine what else they could mean.
