§ Why this shop exists
Fortean
Books.
A small online bookshop for twentieth-century books on the unexplained — UFOs, the paranormal, psi, cryptozoology, esoterica, Forteana. Used paperbacks and hardbacks, mostly between £10 and £40. Based in the UK, ships worldwide.
§ 01 — The name
Charles Hoy Fort,
1874 – 1932.
A Bronx-born journalist who spent the last twenty years of his life patiently transcribing anomalies from scientific journals. Four books, tens of thousands of index slips, one quiet revolution.
Fort gave a name to a way of looking at the world — at orthodoxy, at the polite gaps in received knowledge. He didn't believe his own theories. He proposed them to keep the door open. Nobody who reads him carefully comes away an uncritical believer in anything; many come away with the suspicion that consensus reality is thinner than it claims to be.
The name on this shop telegraphs what's on the shelves — not woo, not true-believer books, but a particular twentieth-century literature that takes the boundary between what we know and what we don't as its subject. Sometimes brilliant. Sometimes terrible. Almost always interesting.
The four Fort titles turn up here regularly — the 1970s Sphere paperbacks and the 1941 Holt omnibus.
"One measures a circle, beginning anywhere."
— Charles Fort, Lo!, 1931
§ 02 — What's on the shelves
Mostly mid-century
paperbacks.
Roughly: anything in English published 1940 – 2000 that takes the unexplained seriously enough to argue with. Plus the foundational pre-war texts.
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In scope
UFO and contactee literature; parapsychology and psi research; cryptozoology; ghost-and-haunting case studies; earth mysteries and ley-line writing; serious Western esoterica; the entire post-war flying saucer paperback boom; back issues of Fortean Times and similar magazines.
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Out of scope
New age self-help, post-2000 reprints (with the occasional exception), conspiracy material with no archival foundation, and anything published in bad faith.
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Especially wanted
First-edition Vallée, Keel, and Hynek. Anything from the SPR Proceedings. Privately printed contactee material from the American Southwest, 1950s. Inscribed copies of anything significant — please write.
§ 03 — On condition
Described
honestly.
Most things here are between £10 and £40. Almost all used.
If a spine is cocked, the listing says so. If there's a previous owner's name in pencil, the listing says so. The gap between "Very Good" and what actually arrives in the post is wider than it should be in this trade. We'd rather close it than benefit from it.
If a book arrives and you don't think the description was accurate, send it back within 14 days for a full refund.