Ron Cobb is known particularly for his crisp and trenchant political cartoons, which were once a staple of the underground press.  He also designed the ecology flag, contributed designs to a number of movies, and did many other things.  However, this enchanting diagram, buried in a copy of the East Village Other (August 27, 1969) is something else: a splendid mandala depicting the variety of human consciousness.  I don’t quite understand it yet, but will keep looking at it.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

John Cowper Powys was a Founder of the Fortean Society, and professed himself delighted with Fort’s work.  Although remembered today mostly for his fiction, his contributions to the Little Blue Book catalog were all essays.  His first was #112, The Secret of Self Development; it was followed by #414, The Art of Happiness, and #435, One Hundred Best Books.  His book of literary essays, Suspended Judgments, was split up into #448-452 (although without the chapter on Verlaine); and his last entry was #1264, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant.

As the title Suspended Judgments indicates, Powys shared Fort’s taste for philosophical skepticism (as opposed to the pseudo-skepticism latterly popularized by The Annoying Randi and his acolytes).  The literary essays are delightfully passionate and capricious: at one point he discourses on all of the trees that remind him of Emily Bronte.  Probably the most Fortean of the batch is The Art of Happiness, which, curiously, seems to be a different text than the one he published later.  Here, for example, is a splendid sentence near the outset, rejecting both materialism and idealism, both science and religion: “But what I would like to indicate just here, is that a certain tentative, irrational, timid, hesitant scepticism has the power sometimes of calling up, out of deep mysterious places, a vision of the universe that commits us neither to an all-seeing God nor to an all-knowing Science, a vision that is confused and infinitely perplexing, but touched all the same by the beauty that no idealism can reach or materialism destroy, the beauty that belongs to that ambiguous look — unspeakable, unutterable — which crosses sometimes the countenance of Nature itself!”

Powys’s charming tribute to Fort doesn’t seem to be available online, so here it is.  It’s taken from The Fortean Society Magazine, #6, January 1942.  (Please click on it for a nice legible text.)

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

“Madame Le Normand’s Gipsy Fortune Telling Cards” bears no indication of date or publisher.  Its previous owner has written the meaning of the cards over the simple black and white illustrations, thereby increasing its graphic charm.  There are 36 cards in the deck, from #1: Cavalier to #36: Cross; tattered instructions in English and German were thoughtfully provided as well.  Marie Anne Lenormand (1772-1843) created somewhat of a vogue for cartomancy in France; a number of decks were named after her.  Here’s the box.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

At the beginning of his literary career, Alphonse Allais contributed squibs, jokes, and one-liners to various small Parisian papers.  He followed already established formulas: the fable-express (a brief fable with a punning moral), the autograph (a line ending with a pun on someone’s name).  He became particularly identified with the comble, the “acme.”  He didn’t invent the form, but quickly made it his own.  Here are a few examples, culled from Le Tintamarre, 1877-1879.

The acme of caution: To walk on your hands, so tiles won’t fall on your head.

The acme of thrift: When in the park, to gather grass for your rabbits.

The acme of cynicism: To kill a shopkeeper at night, and then post on the door: closed because of death.

The acme of impudence: To crush a gentleman’s hat with your fist, and then ask if he’s looking for trouble.

The acme of politeness: To sit on your ass, and beg its pardon.

The acme of consideration: To make a hole in the wall at night, so you can return home without waking the concierge.

The acme of skill: To learn how to read time on a barometer.

The acme of resemblance: To be able to shave before your portrait.

The acme of affectation: To stay at home, and play the piano every hour and half hour, so your neighbors will think you have a musical clock.

The acme of distraction: To lose your glasses, and then put them on to look for them.

The acme of courtesy: To put fallen leaves back on the tree.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

(Posted by Doug Skinner.  Picture by Ray Gleason.)

Tiffany Thayer, aka Elmer Ellsworth, founder of the Fortean Society, publisher of Doubt, writer of memorably sleazy fiction, was in Hollywood throughout much of the ’30s.  Several of his novels were made into reasonably successful movies (particularly Call Her Savage, tailored for Clara Bow).  He had less luck writing screenplays; only a few scenes and scraps of dialogue made it to the screen.

He did, however, act in one movie: The Devil on Horseback, in 1936.  In it, he plays a press agent named Wilbur Hitchcock; and provides comic relief by pretending to be saddle sore and hungover.

I can’t tell you if it’s a good movie or not, since I have little affinity for the medium.  Like other movies, it features recordings of actors playing make believe and reciting dialogue that they’ve memorized.  If that appeals to you, maybe you’ll like it.  At any rate, it also contains the only footage of the curious Mr. Thayer.  And it’s now on YouTube, so you can see for yourself.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Whitman’s “Zodiac Circle Playing Card Game” dates from 1931.  There were Zodiac Cards, which were to be laid out in a circle, and the other cards were to be correlated to your sun sign.  I haven’t tried it.  I like those colors.

(Posted by Doug Skinner.)

Tiffany Thayer had his own, rather idiosyncratic, ideas about what topics were suitable for the Fortean Society.  In the 56th issue of Doubt (sometime in 1957), he published a list of categories that members were urged to investigate.  The list differs in many ways from contemporary Forteana, particularly in Thayer’s customary mix of social and political issues with scientific anomalies.  Interesting topics all, though, I think.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Ben Hecht declared himself “the first disciple of Charles Fort” in a review of The Book of the Damned,  and used the opportunity to coin the word “Fortean.”  Tiffany Thayer said the took Hecht as a model when he started writing fiction; and Thirteen Men, in particular, seems to aim for Hecht’s distinctive flash.

Like the other Founders of the Fortean Society, Hecht was more interested in Fort than in what is now commonly called Forteana.  His own prolific output of columns, books, short stories, plays, and screenplays is marked mostly by an unerring sense of the commercial.  But a fondness for Fort seems to have persisted in his family: my own copy of The Books of Charles Fort was a gift to Lilli Palmer from Hecht’s daughter Edwina.

Hecht published seven collections of his short stories as Little Blue Books.

698: Tales of Chicago Streets
699: Broken Necks and Other Stories
1163: The Policewoman’s Love-Hungry Daughter, and Other Stories of Chicago Life
1164: The Unlovely Sin, and Other Stories of Desire’s Pawns
1165: Jazz, and Other Stories of Young Love
1166: Infatuation, and Other Stories of Love’s Misfits
1167: The Sinister Sex, and Other Stories of Marriage

The first two were printed in 1925, the rest in 1927: a few years before the FS.

“The Policewoman’s Love-Hungry Daughter” (and what a splendid title that is) contains my favorite, “The Movie Maniac,” in which a man’s life goes haywire when he starts adapting the mannerisms of movie actors: “I could ask him no question without bringing upon me the entire business of surprise, intelligence, doubt, hesitation, fear, and even anguish.  His gestures were the ludicrous exaggerations of the movies.  He had, it was evident, stepped out of the colorless routine of his copy reading days into some magnificent limbo.”

Unfortunately, such contempt for the cinema has not become a Fortean principle.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The “Little Blue Books” were published by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius from about 1919 to 1947.  They were small, cheaply produced, and sold for around a nickel.  There were over 2000 of them; the exact number, despite diligent scholars, is unknown, since the books were often retitled, assigned new numbers, or replaced by other books.

Haldeman-Julius started the series explicitly to promote socialism, atheism, science, the theory of evolution, sex education, and other progressive causes.  He soon added joke books, recipes, short stories, how-to guides, language instruction, and other more commercial material.

Neither Charles Fort nor Tiffany Thayer contributed to the catalog; but several of the Founders did, as well as many later members, some more active than others.  It’s worth pointing out that many of the Founders lent their names to help Fort sell books, and had no interest in Thayer’s antics.  (There’s an interesting cache of letters in the University of Virginia, in which a number of the hapless Founders make this explicit.)

Theodore Dreiser was one of Fort’s oldest friends and staunchest supporters, and one of the first to flee when Thayer got frisky.  Haldeman-Julius published three Dreiser titles in 1924, each containing two short pieces: 659 was taken from Free, and Other Stories; 660 from Twelve Men; and 661 from Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub. (W. L. S., by the way, was the illustrator William Lewis Sonntag, Jr.)  In 1931, “How the Great Corporations Rule the United States” was released as part of a collection of articles by various writers, including pieces on black civil rights, the labor movement, and other topics.  Dreiser, the most famous name, was the only one credited on the cover.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)