NEW FROM THE FURTHER READING LIBRARY 🔵This season we present three collectors who focused on the ephemeral and the intangible, each in their own way driven to catalog and analyze the wonders of the world that cannot be wholly perceived. Available now, as single titles or bundled, from our website. Find them in your local bookshop April 28.
Charles Fort: Research - Clippings, correspondence, letters to newspapers and fantastically small notes from one of the twentieth century’s most skeptical minds. Charles Fort (1874-1932) sought explanations for the improbable and found connections where others never thought to tread.
Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal - Comedy legend Jackie Gleason (1916-1987) was one of early television’s biggest stars. A larger than life figure on and off screen, Gleason was avidly interested in reading publications on parapsychology, ESP, UFOS and other outré subjects. Selections from his 3,000 volume library of esoteric titles and coverage of his never realized pet-project of a TV show about the Paranormal.
Tony Schwartz: Snapshots in Sound - Tony Schwartz (1923-2008) was a sound recording pioneer who sought to capture all the “endangered sounds” of his NYC neighborhood from “After Dinner Jokes” and “Elevator Operators” to “Hudson River Fog” and “Moondog.” His decades worth of brilliant and charming radio broadcasts, records, and advertising work changed the way that people tune in to their environment.
The Further Reading Library is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores - through a collection of original documents, photographs and primary source material - a body of work, a specific topic or an individual.
Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Inel-Bücherei series, the Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert (@lamphole ) and distributed by @artbook
#furtherreadinglibrary #jackiegleason #charlesfort #tonyschwartz #fortean
The Further Reading Library is an ongoing series of books dedicated to forgotten ideas, overlooked accomplishments and idiosyncratic world views. Each book explores - through a collection of original documents, photographs and primary source material - a body of work, a specific topic or an individual. Modeled on the size and range of topics of the King Penguin and Inel-Bücherei series, the Further Reading Library is edited by Christine Burgin and Andrew Lampert (@lamphole ).
The first five books in the series will be released in April 2025:
Loïe Fuller: Lecture on Radium
Thomas Wilfred: Clavilux and Lumia Home Models
Richard Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones are Ancient Books
Richard Foreman: No Title
Margaret Watts Wughes: Sound May Be Seen
#furtherreadinglibrary #smallpress #margaretwattshughes #richardforeman #richardsharpeshaver #loiefuller #thomaswilfred #thomaswilfredlumia #soundart #dancehistory
“I am a collector of notes upon subjects that have diversity, such as, deviations from concentricity in the lunar crater Copernicus and a sudden appearance of purple Englishmen, stationary meteor-radiants; and a reported growth of hair on the bald head of a mummy. But my liveliest interest is not so much in things as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidences?” — Charles Fort
Charles Fort: Research is available now at furtherreading.com
TOWARDS A FORTEAN CINEMA
May 14 – 21
A committed skeptic who balked at so-called facts and assumed knowledge, Charles Fort (1874-1932) was the preeminent chronicler of inexplicable natural phenomena in the early twentieth century. His books – including THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED (1919) and WILD TALENTS (1932) – collected incidents of historically strange happenings, potential paranormal activity, and possible extraterrestrial interference. The incredible range of influence Fort’s writings have exerted in the many decades since his death – from sci-fi writers and religious scholars to crackpot conspiracists and valid skeptics – is proof of our culture’s predilection for the fantastic and desire to embrace the unknown. At this point, Fort’s vivid descriptions and predictions are so deeply woven into our collective imagination that they are both common knowledge and a guide for further research.
Guest curators Peggy Ahwesh and Andrew Lampert present a sampler of favorite films and videos that both speak to Fort’s contrarian ideas and take baby steps towards addressing the unanswerable mysteries of our universe. Included are eclectic works dealing with aliens, ghosts, the cosmos, technology, magic, and other Fortean topics, as well as two popular 1980s features concerning young girls with psychic powers, or as Fort called them “wild talents,” that trigger chaos and destruction around them.
These screenings celebrate the publication of CHARLES FORT: RESEARCH, from The Further Reading Library. Edited by Lampert with Christine Burgin, and featuring an appreciation written by Peggy Ahwesh, the book presents a previously unseen array of Fort’s handwritten notes, news clippings, letters written to newspapers, and the fascinating replies that he received from readers.
See our website for full program details.
@lamphole@ahwesh_peggy@furtherreadinglibrary
“Life is an inexhaustible reservoir of material to be recorded and listened to. The whole world of non-musical sound and the spoken word has been approached very narrowly until now. Putting plays, readings by poets, and the voices of famous people on tape and records is a wonderful thing indeed, but enterprises of this sort amount to very little compared to what there is to be recorded.” — Tony Schwartz, Communicating with Tape
Tony Schwartz: Snapshots in Sound is available now at furtherreading.com
#tonyschwartz #furtherreadinglibrary
To most of us, Jackie Gleason is the man who is without doubt America’s number one comic, and one of its finest character actors. He is the man who makes us roar with laughter—a laughter sometimes mixed with wry appreciation of his insight into the more serious aspects of human nature—at his TV performance in “The Honeymooners.” He is the actor who won nationwide approval and respect for his portrayal of the pool player “Fat Eddie” in the film “The Hustler,” and his stage performance in the Eugene O’Neill play, “Ah, Wilderness.”
There is another side to Jackie Gleason, a side few people know about, because he takes care not to publicize it. Jackie Gleason is a man with a serious and longstanding interest in the occult, psychic sciences and the mysterious and unexplained phenomena of our time. —
Robert Warner, Beyond magazine, November 1969
Jackie Gleason: Library of the Paranormal is available now at furtherreading.com
#jackiegleason #furtherreadinglibrary #paranormal
Richard Sharpe Shaver (born 1907 in Berwick, Pennsylvania) became a national sensation in the 1940s with his dramatic accounts of a highly advanced civilization that inhabited Earth in prehistoric times. An itinerant Midwesterner, he’d been employed as a landscape gardener, a figure model for art classes, and a welder at Henry Ford’s original auto plant. He gained public attention as a writer who asserted that descendants of those early beings still live in hidden underground cities, where they wield terrifying technology capable of controlling thoughts. Many readers agreed with Shaver, and a splashy controversy ensued.
Public fascination with his writings subsided during the 1950s, but Shaver continued searching for evidence of a great bygone civilization. About 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today.
#richardsharpeshaver #rockfogos #furtherreadinglibrary
Margaret Watts Hughes and her invention of the eidophone were covered extensively in the international press upon publication of Voice Figures in 1891. Interest was renewed in 1904 when she published the second edition, The Eidophone: Voice Figures.
#margaretwattshughes #voicefigures #furtherreadinglibrary
“The last of the evening is devoted to the greatest invention in relation to the art of painting which as yet has been achieved. I have asked Mr. Wilfred to bring his home-clavilux so that you
can come on stage after the performance and look at it for yourself. For this little instrument will, I hope, eventually enter into every home and develop a love for color as the radio and gramophone have developed a love for great music.”
Excerpt from a draft of Katherine Dreier’s lecture “The Art of the Future,” delivered March 23, 1931, at the New School for Social Research, New York. Wilfred’s performance followed films by Lotte Reiniger and Marcel Duchamp and a demonstration by Alexander Archipenko of his Archipentura.
#wilfred #clavilux #furtherreadinglibrary
“No Title” is an undated text handwritten on a series of 640 3 × 5 notecards by Richard Foreman. The cards were discovered stored in a tin at his home in 2021. He said that they were meant to be spoken aloud in any order either by one performer or by two or more performers who split the deck. 96 examples are included in the book “No Title”.
#richardforeman #furtherreadinglibrary
#ontologicalhysterictheater
“About 1960, while living in rural Wisconsin, Shaver formulated a hypothesis that would captivate him for the balance of his life: some stones are ancient books, designed and fabricated by people of the remote past using technology that surpasses anything known today. He identified complex pictorial content in these ‘rock books.’ Images reveal themselves at every angle and every level of magnification and are layered throughout each rock. Graphic symbols and lettering also appear in what he called ‘the most fascinating exhibition of virtuosity in art existent on earth.’” - Brian Tucker, in “William Sharpe Shaver: Some Stones Are Ancient Books”
#williamsharpeshaver #rockfogos #furtherreadinglibrary
