I’ve posted the Little Blue Books of Theodore Dreiser, Ben Hecht, and John Cowper Powys.  None of the other Founders (Tiffany Thayer, Harry Leon Wilson, Burton Rascoe, Alexander Woollcott, J. David Stern, Aaron Sussman, Booth Tarkington) wrote for Haldeman-Julius — except one.  That was Harry Elmer Barnes.

Barnes quickly disappeared from the Founders’ roster.  He was never mentioned in Doubt (that I know of, at least), and barely rates a name-check in books on Fort.  He wrote fourteen Little Blue Books, all published between 1929 and 1931.

1462: Science Versus Religion as a Guide to Life
1468: How to Deal With Crime
1472: History: Truth or Propaganda?
1480: The Causes of the World War
1483: Trial by Jury: The Great Burlesque of Modern Criminal Justice
1506: How Capitalism Developed
1507: A Rational View of the Sex Issue
1511: War Guilt and the Present European Situation
1525: The Menace of the Modern Prison
1526: Peace Plans From Kant to Kellogg
1542: Who Started the World War?
1586: Were the Founding Fathers Pious Angels and Plaster Saints?
1588: Debunking the Myth of Calvin Coolidge
1653: The Fallacies of American Historians

They fall into a few categories: anti-religious tracts, screeds against the American justice system, critiques of historians, and accounts of the first World War.  In addition, he took on capitalism, peace initiatives, and the public perception of Coolidge.  These were all staple LBB topics, and in line with The Fortean Society’s interests — or, at least, with Thayer’s.

In many of these, his model seemed to be H. L. Mencken; in fact, he padded his pages with long quotes from Mencken.  He shared Mencken’s contempt for rural America, his atheism, his taste for eugenics, and his sympathy for Germany.  His principal critique of trial by jury, for example, was that jurors were too stupid to do the job properly, and that trials should be decided by trained criminologists.  His style was rather pompous; he certainly lacked the Mencken verve.

The books on World War 1, however, hint at trouble to come.  He argued that the true aggressors were France, which hoped to retake Alsace and Lorraine, and Russia, which wanted control of the Straits of Constantinople.  I suppose you can make a case for that; I’ve never understood what that war was about.  Unfortunately, the Barnes mix of revisionism, contrarianism, and sympathy for Germany gradually took an ugly turn: by the ’50s he was a full-fledged Holocaust denier.  By then, the LBBs had ended, and the Fortean Society wanted nothing to do with him.  His Founders’ chair, or whatever it was, was taken by T. Swann Harding.  Harding too was a Haldeman-Julius writer; we’ll look at him next.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Our tribute to Les Blank was an unqualified delight.  Blank’s films unfurled in all their majesty; and his sons Harrod and Beau were on hand to provide commentary and to answer questions.  Our thanks to all who attended.

You can see a rare photographic portrait of me, enjoying my edition of Alphonse Allais’s How I Became an Idiot, over at the Black Scat site.  If you forgot to buy a copy for some reason, you can still correct the mistake.

There will be a student recital at the Jalopy Theater this Friday, the 16th, at 6 pm.  If you show up, you can see my uke student Ellie bring down the house.  Jalopy is still at 315 Columbia St., in Brooklyn.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The third volume of the adventures of Captain Cap (there will be four) is now available from Black Scat Books, in a limited edition of 125.  The adventures of the prototypical ‘pataphysical antihero, first published by Alphonse Allais in 1902, have been scrupulously translated, illustrated, and annotated by Doug Skinner; they appear in English for the first time.  The incomparable Captain is particularly erudite in these sixteen stories: as he savors his cocktails, he elucidates the antifilter, the nonuplet, ballooning without a balloon, grandiose billiards, fecal residue in Christmas sausage, shoeing horses at a distance, and much more.  To quote Albert Capus: “The humor of Alphonse Allais was a rigorous affirmation, whose gravity could not be doubted.  And since it was also impossible to believe, you found yourself in a strange position which condemned you to a burst of laughter.”

And you can find it at Black Scat Books.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

Harry Ingalls, “the greatest fortune teller in the world,” made the unusual choice to put his portrait on each card in his deck.  And each of those cards, as you can see, offers a variety of fortune telling options, framing that searching gaze.  The box is even busier, a sort of carnival poster in miniature.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

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.)