'The Damned Universe of Charles Fort' by Louis Kaplan

[Justin_Anstey]

Is anybody here familiar with this book?:
'The Damned Universe of Charles Fort' by Louis Kaplan
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos...34483/sr=1-9/ref=sr_sp_re/026-0028896-2486069
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http://www.google.com/search?q=cach...an++"Damned+Universe+of+Charles+Fort"++&hl=en

Publications
A) Books
2. The Damned Universe of Charles Fort (New York: Autonomedia Press, 1993), 160 pp. Also in German. Editor and essays on the American humorist-scientist and collector of scientific anomalies, Surreal marvels, and museological curiosities.

What about these?:

B) Selected Essays
7. "Suspense, Para-Science and Laughter," Sub-stance 70/71 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press), Fall 1993. On the comic dramaturgies of two para-scientific historiographers, Charles Fort and David Starr Jordan. French version in the journal TLE.

D) Selected Presentations
34. "Fort Dataist," Science and Modernity Conference, Verbund für Wissenschaftsgeschichte Summer Academy, Berlin, Germany, July 18, 1990.
35. "Charles Fort's Humorous Science," Alter-Histoire Seminar, Ecole Hautes des Etudes Sciences Sociales, Paris, France, June 5, 1990.

Does anybody know about this David Starr Jordan?

-Justin

 

[Anonymous]

Kaplan

He seems to be a professional biographer:

''A bibliography of American autobiographies
A fourteen year endeavor by Louis Kaplan, this bibliography brings together over 6,000 autobiographies published before 1945 and listed insources such as Evans, Sabin, and Dictionary of American biography.It is also based on field work Kaplan did in the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Antiquarian Society Library, and several libraries "west of the Mississippi." An amazing compilation with a subject index.''

(http://library.brandeis.edu/about/nsf/nsf2000/findingautobiography.html)

Rather like the Charles Fort of biography?

 

[Comfortably Numb]

I have also just come across this Kaplan publication, which can be downloaded as a .pdf file here:

Telepathic Technologics
A Seance in Fortean Science

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...sQFnoECAcQAQ&usg=AOvVaw2uJlpPLleEobrPLt-yNOTF

 

[eburacum]

I know this is an old thread, but here's an answer of sorts.

Does anybody know about this David Starr Jordan?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Starr_Jordan
Sounds like a bit of a dick.

His teaching included his version of eugenics, which "sought to prevent the decay of the Anglo-Saxon/Nordic race by limiting racial mixing and by preventing the reproduction of those he deemed unfit."[7]
...
In 1928 Jordan served on the initial board of trustees of the Human Betterment Foundation, a eugenics organization that advocated compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States.[25][26] He then chaired the first Committee on Eugenics of the American Breeder's Association from which the California program of forced deportation and sterilization emerged.
...
In 1905, Jordan launched an apparent coverup of the murder by poisoning of Jane Stanford.

His involvement in Fortean studies seems to have been entirely negative.

Jordan was skeptical of certain other pseudoscientific claims. He coined the term "sciosophy" to describe the "systematized ignorance" of the pseudoscientist.[38][39] His later work, The Higher Foolishness, inspired the philosopher Martin Gardner to write his treatise on scientific skepticism, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.[38] However, Gardner noted that "the book is infuriating because although Jordan mentions the titles of dozens of crank works, from which he quotes extensively, he seldom tells you the names of the authors."