12 h 26 minAudiobook13 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at cost
Audiobook edition · 12 h 26 minPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What happens to the strange reports that science leaves outside the door?
In The Book of the Damned, Charles Fort gathers reports of coloured rain, unexplained lights, and objects falling from the sky. He draws them from newspapers and scientific journals, calling them the “damned”: the excluded. His question reaches beyond each odd event. Who decides which observations deserve a place in our picture of the world?
Fort turns this parade of puzzles into a sharp, often funny argument about knowledge and dogma. He offers guesses, including a place above us where lost things collect, but admits he does not fully believe his own explanations. The challenge is not to accept every strange report. It is to notice the habit of deciding what can count before looking.
What you’ll discover
- Rain that raises questions Explore reports of red, black, and other coloured rains, alongside the explanations offered for them.
- The excluded evidence Follow Fort through printed reports that challenge the boundaries of accepted scientific discussion.
- A strange place above Meet the Super-Sargasso Sea, Fort’s guess at a place where lost things gather.
- Doubt with a grin Enjoy a straight-faced joker whose sarcasm reaches even his own attempts at explanation.
- No final dividing line Consider intermediatism, Fort’s philosophy that questions sharp boundaries between the explained and unexplained.
Who will love it
You will enjoy this if you love unsolved puzzles, old newspaper curiosities, sharp humor aimed at experts, and asking what an explanation really explains.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Science excludes data to look complete
- One favored explanation can outlive its problems
- Falling stones were once ruled impossible
- Black and red rains defy tidy explanations
- The same small place gets the same strange fall
- Frogs, fish and larvae fall in puzzling patterns
- Shaped stones and metal fall and get explained away
- Astronomy tells its hits and hides its misses
- Lights, wheels and shadows hint at visitors overhead
- Accept ideas for now and hold them loosely
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The Book of the Damned
by Charles Fort · 1919
Charles Fort gathers reports of fish, frogs and coal falling from the sky, the cases science ignores.
Challenging10–20 hours to readEnglish
Excellent
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In short
What if the facts that do not fit are the most useful ones? Charles Fort asks that question and answers it with a procession of everything science has shut out.
The Book of the Damned at a glance
- Reading time
- About 7 h 15 min5 h 45 min fast, 8 h 40 min slow
- Length
- 103,500 words28 chapters
- Pages
- 305 pages461 in large print
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1919by Charles Fort
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Science excludes data to look complete
Fort begins with a parade. He pictures the facts that science has thrown out as columns marching past, some solemn, some silly, all condemned. By the damned he means the excluded. His warning is that today's outcasts may one day do the excluding.
His reasoning rests on continuity. Red and yellow blend into orange, so any line between red facts and yellow facts must fall in the wrong place. A barn is a house if someone lives in it, and so is a bird's nest. If nothing differs absolutely from anything else, every boundary is a convenience.
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- 15-minute summary
- The key ideas of the whole book in about 13 minutes. A good first look, or a refresher.
Details
- First published
- 1919
- Language
- English
- Reading time
- 8 h 5 min
- Level
- Challenging
Cite this edition
Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-book-of-the-damned.
Fort, C. (2026). The book of the damned. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-book-of-the-damned (Original work published 1919)
Fort, Charles. The Book of the Damned. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-book-of-the-damned.
@book{fort2026book,
author = {Fort, Charles},
title = {The Book of the Damned},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-book-of-the-damned},
note = {First published 1919}
}
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What is The Book of the Damned about?
It is a collection of reports that Charles Fort says science excludes, such as falls of fish, frogs, jelly and shaped stones, plus strange lights in the sky, with an argument that exclusion is arbitrary.
What does the word damned mean in the title?
Fort uses damned to mean excluded. The damned are facts and reports that accepted science has ruled out, and he warns that they may one day become the accepted ones.
What is the Super-Sargasso Sea?
It is Fort's name for an imagined region above the earth where objects hang beyond ordinary gravity until storms shake them down. He offers it as a tentative idea to explain repeated falls.
The author
Charles Fort
1874–1932 · American writer on unexplained phenomena
Charles Fort was an American writer born in Albany, New York, in 1874. He lived in New York City and London. He collected reports of unexplained events and wrote The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). He died in New York City in 1932.
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