Charles Fort (1874–1932) spent years in the newspaper and scientific-journal archives of the New York Public Library, collecting reports that mainstream science of his day had dismissed, ignored, or explained away: falls of stones, fish, and colored substances from clear skies; unexplained lights; strandings and disappearances. He did not argue for any single alternative theory; he argued that the process of exclusion itself — the mechanism by which "Science" decides what counts as a fact — deserved as much suspicion as the anomalies it threw out. His method gave English a word, "Fortean," for exactly this stance of cataloguing without concluding.

This shelf holds Fort's foundational book, The Book of the Damned (1919), in which the method and the voice — aphoristic, ironic, deliberately unresolved — both first appear complete.