Notes on the Collection of Sidis's Pseudonyms

Dan Mahony, M. Phil.

"The numbers of people injured and killed by motor vehicles are said to be at rates which approximate the losses of a major war."

Library of Congress Page re Sidis as Author
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The  taxonomy (compilation and synthesis) required for this work is perhaps as great as was that required for Notes on the Collection of Transfers. 

The book uses the same format as we find in Transfers and in The Tribes and the States: chapters with numbered sections, and headings in italics.

Julius Eichel's Bio referred to Sidis's "considerable interest in transportation research." Sidis's Geprodis project was devoted in good part to transportation research (see below).

No government research grant is mentioned as funding this work, nor is funding by any charitable organisation or private foundation mentioned. The book was instead simply published by the same author-funded "vanity press" Sidis used for Notes on the Collection of Transfers. Such an anonymous contribution would be typical of Sidis.

The Library of Congress lists two books by a Barry Mulligan. One was written by a laboratory scientist George Middlekoff using Mulligan as a pseudonym.

Library of Congress Page re Sidis as Author
(when there click: Scope Note)
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There are 117 footnotes for the first chapter alone. Some footnotes refer to works which could have been found only in a major research library such as Harvard's where Sidis was a student at the time.

The Penacooks are described in this book as a federation. No other book has ever said Penacook was a federation―other than The Tribes and the States. This book, in effect, provides the footnotes for the early chapters of The Tribes and the States.

Much of the book describes the author's hikes during summer vacations spent near Mt. Chocorua in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Boris's friend and mentor, William James, had a summer home in Chocorua, NH. postcard).  When Sidis was four years old, Boris inquired of James about purchasing some property in the Chocorua area (letter from William James, Oct. 1, 1902, Houghton Library, Harvard University). The book's Introduction indicates that "Junior" first began to explore the area when he was four years old (1902). The descriptions of the trails of the White Mountains of New Hampshire around the town of Albany, within sight of Mt. Chocorua, are so minutely detailed that only a person with a superior memory could have written them. An article in North American Review (1907) says young Sidis "spent his summers at a hotel in the mountains. . . It was his pleasing custom to speak of all the guests in the house, in which he spent his summers. . . "—Bio  (See also Passaconaway in the White Mountains, Chapter 13.) His mother, Dr. Sarah Sidis worked in the White Mountains in the summers before she married Boris, and Boris had visited her there (Sidis Story, Chap. III; Chap. VI.) The final paragraph of the book reveals that its author lived in Boston, and that the train stopped at Portsmouth, NH.

The "author's father" claims to have written the Introduction on the author's birthday. Sidis's birthday was April Fool's Day. 

Sidis often quoted the poetry of Lucy Larcom who is credited with having named many of the White Mountains.

It would be quite unusual for an author capable of such deep research to have written only one book, but the Library of Congress catalog lists no other books by a Charles Edward Beals, Jr.

This book was published by Badger in Boston, an author-funded publisher, although this included journals funded by scientific societies in which Boris Sidis was involved. Many of the works by W.J.'s father Boris were published by Badger, as well as W.J.'s The Animate and the Inanimate.  (See Boris Sidis Bibliography; Badger Letter) 

(Beals Jr.'s father, Charles Edward Beals, was a pacifist who wrote anti-war pamplets prior to World War I. Such a person would have been admired by Sidis who was himself arrested for participating in anti-draft demonstrations.)

Continuity News, Feb., 1939 mentions the pamphlet version. 

The New Yorker (July, 1937) describes Sidis's research on Native American history, and specifically mentions the Okamakammessets. Nowhere else can one find this tribe's name in print except in the earliest histories of the Massachusetts town of Marlborough, and in these the tribe name is spelled differently. Sidis again claims the book was written by them Introduction.

In the attic of a relative of Sidis, I found the manuscript of The Tribes and the States in a suitcase owned by his sister Helena. (She had directed me to its location.)

Also in the suitcase were the 89 articles entitled "Meet Boston."

(Participant in the Shays Rebellion, 1787, an event Sidis considered to be very important in American history. Sidis mentions Job Shattuck in Chapter 26.)