Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

St Charles Fort? February 23, 2025

Charles Fort was a fiercely eccentric and independent individual who collected, in the early twentieth century, anomaly reports, as some of his contemporaries collected cigarette cards. He described and lovingly collated these anomalies in five books he published between 1906 and 1932: after thousands of visits to libraries, most in New York. These books are fun to read and are written in an absolutely unique English. Fort’s prose is like Brighton Rock, it has his name on it right the way through. Fort’s work proved a publishing phenomenon; not immediately, but his books are still read today. Beach’s problem with all this is not so much Charles Fort in himself: Fort was a ‘type’ that genetics throws up every five hundred rolls on the dice. There are ostrich farms in Wales; and gnome sanctuaries in Sweden run by similar ‘exceptions’. The world is unquestionably richer for such folk. But what Beach does not get is the extraordinary adulation that Fort still excites among his successors, ‘the Forteans’. Here is one example from a book recently reviewed here, the marvellous: Return to Magonia.

This is a pioneering work, but in fact we are merely standing on the shoulders of the anomalists who came before us, starting with the founder of the field itself, American writer Charles Fort (1874-1932).

This might be just politeness on the part of two well-mannered writers – a nod to the grandparents as it were. The words are, to an outsider, asked to compare the volumes slightly bizarre though. Compare what Charles Fort achieved with what Chris Aubeck and Martin Shough achieved in Return. Fort looked for anomalies and told stories with them: he rarely analysed reports or applied ‘source-criticism’ (something particularly important with nineteenth-century invention in newspapers). CA and MS wrote a series of case-studies in which they analyse cases: where they visit sites; find other sources, check censuses etc. The two works have nothing in common save the general subject matter. But would you really compare Rosemary Sutcliff (children’s historical novelist) and Sheppard Frere (sober historian) because they both wrote about Roman Britain?

What was Charles Fort really? Well, he was not the first collector of anomalies. There had been several of those from classical times to the mid nineteenth century. There is a case to be made that he is the first extensive secular collector of anomalies: he dedicated thirty years to collecting. He was not a successful philosopher of the obscure: though his title ‘The Book of the Damned’ is good at getting at the way that we just ignore things that don’t fit. His written style was, as noted above, unique: though whether uniquely terrible or uniquely brilliant is debated. He was an archivist and a visionary – the William Blake of the stacks – not an analyst and a scholar. It is very unfortunate that an emerging field has been named after a man with these characteristics, not least because so many of his successors so transparently have his vices without Fort’s virtues: bad books on UFOs stand out here. How much better it would have been were Forteans just uniformly called anomalists or, if someone had to be patron saint, Langians, after Andrew Lang. This was a man who could play the ‘damned’ card as well as Fort but could also actually take a case and shake it until the loose bits rattled.