Audiobook · read by volunteers
Book of the Damned
Charles Hoy Fort (1874–1932)
Read by Matthew Shepherd, Andrew Coleman, Jc Guan, flakker, Acacia Wood, Patrick McHaffie, Great Plains · 28 chapters · 14 h 27
About the book
Showers of frogs. Rains of stones. Lights in the sky that do not belong to any known thing. People who vanish without trace, and creatures that should not exist. Charles Fort spent years in libraries collecting reports of events that science had set aside as too awkward to explain, and in this first book he sets them out in great numbers, with a wry, argumentative and unmistakable voice. Is he serious? Is he joking? He challenges the confident claims of scientists and the habits of mind that make us ignore what does not fit. The result is a strange and fascinating mixture of data, sarcasm and speculation, much quoted by later writers. Twenty-eight chapters and nearly fifteen hours for those who like their facts odd.
Introduction
Charles Hoy Fort lived from 1874 to 1932. Born in the United States, he worked as a journalist and writer of fiction before devoting himself to the study of unusual reports from newspapers and scientific journals. He spent long hours in the New York Public Library and the British Museum, copying notes on thousands of strange events.
The Book of the Damned, published in 1919, was his first non-fiction work. It deals with a wide range of anomalous phenomena, including unidentified flying objects, strange falls of organic and inorganic materials from the sky, odd weather patterns, the possible existence of creatures generally held to be mythological, the disappearance of people in strange circumstances, and many more. It is historically considered to be the first book in the specific field of anomalous phenomena, and it inspired a whole tradition of writing about the unexplained. The "damned" of the title are the facts that orthodox science excludes.
Fort wrote in a distinctive style, sardonic and elliptical, and readers differ on how far he meant his theories to be taken literally. Some see him as a prankster, others as a serious critic of scientific dogma.
The LibriVox recording was made by volunteers who share the reading of the twenty-eight chapters. The whole runs to about fourteen and a half hours. Why listen? Because it is a book of its own kind, a book that inspired generations of curious readers. Whatever you make of his claims, Fort is a provocative companion, and his questions about how we decide what counts as knowledge remain good ones.
Public domain
Charles Hoy Fort died in 1932: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text