Fort took thousands of notes during his lifetime. In his short story "The Giant, the Insect and The Philanthropic-looking Old Gentleman" (first published by the International Fortean Organization in issue No. 70 of the "INFO Journal: Science and the Unknown"), Fort spoke of sitting on a park bench at The Cloisters in New York City and tossing some 48,000 notes, not all of his collection by any means, into the wind. The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in a cramped shorthand of Fort's own invention, and some of them survive in the collections of the University of Pennsylvania. More than once, depressed and discouraged, Fort destroyed his work, but began anew. Some notes were published by the Fortean Society magazine "Doubt" and, upon the death of its editor Tiffany Thayer in 1959 most were donated to the New York Public Library, where they are still available to researchers of the unknown.