At one time, Charles Fort had 40,000 notes coll­ected over nearly 40 years from jour­nals, papers and books pub­lished be­tween 1800 and 1930. Cor­liss has sur­passed that by sev­e­ral tens of thous­ands, pub­lished (single-hand­edly) in more than 25 of a pro­jected 35 vol­umes of his Cat­alog of Anom­alies.

He describes his Cat­alogs as “a mass­ive hoard of scient­ific enigmas, para­doxes, and eso­ter­ica” gleaned from more than 16,000 vol­umes of science jour­nals and mag­a­zines from 1820 to date. “I believe my coll­ect­ion is unique,” he wrote in an intro­duct­ion. “It trans­cends modern com­put­er­ized data bases in its very wide time frame and its focus on the anom­al­ous and curi­ous.” Cor­liss’s phil­o­sophy would merit Fort’s app­roval: “Anom­al­ies reveal nature as it really is: com­plex, chaotic, poss­ibly even unplumb­able [..] The search itself is every­thing.”

The intro­duct­ory sect­ions explain Cor­liss’s aims, the value to science of study­ing anom­al­ies, and his cat­eg­ory system, around which the entire proj­ect, cross-ref­er­ences and indexes are organ­ised.