“My subject is New Lands – things, objects, beings that are, or may be, the data of coming expansions.”1
Charles Fort’s second book appeared in 1923 and was a product of his time in his own new land – Great Britain. He and Anna sailed on the RMS Olympic, sister of the Titanic, to spend eight years at 39A Marchmont Street near Russell Square. Ten minutes away was the British Museum Reading Room. Fort exulted in its periodicals and newspapers from across Britain and its colonies: the “accessibility and abundance of data”.2 Many of the phenomena carried on themes from Book of the Damned. Falls of fish, frogs and other creatures and materials; odd lights seen in the sky or on the Moon. But the years in London offered new material. At one point a sea serpent pops up (a topic in Lo!) and there are remarks on psychic phenomena (a topic of Wild Talents).
continued many philosophical themes of . There are the invocations of Exclusionism, the ‘underlying nexus’ of phenomena and Dogmatic Science. New ideas appear, too, like ‘era-intelligence’ and an idea of existence as endlessly ‘serial’. Existence is conceived to develop, much like an organism. ends evocatively – “Sounds and an interval; sounds and the same interval; sounds again – that there is one integrating organism and There are barrages of data – ‘Sci. Amer., vol. this and p. that’ – and Fort’s usual funniness and poetic flashes.
