Futility

In an eerie foreshadowing of the wreck of the Titanic fourteen years later, Morgan Robertson published a novella, Futility (1898), that went largely unnoticed. Robertson (1861 – 1915), the son of a ship captain, was a writer of short stories and novels that dealt with nautical themes. However, this particular novella is remarkable only in hindsight: the coincidences between the Titan and Titanic are absolutely astonishing.

The novella concerns itself with the life of John Rowland who overcomes obstacles and harship to find love and redemption. Midway through the story, Rowland becomes a deckhand on the maiden voyage of the Titan, the world’s largest luxury liner that was considered to be unsinkable. Somewhere in the North Atlantic, on a cold April night, the ship hits an iceberg and capsizes. Because the ship did not have enough lifeboats, most of the passengers perished in the freezing water. Rowland survives (1 of 13 survivors) by jumping on an iceberg and is eventually saved by a passing ship. Indeed, the Titanic tragedy in 1912 is a notable example of life imitating art.

Robertson lived long enough to witness the sinking of the Titanic and he, as well as many other contemporaries, were struck by the many amazing coincidences. He quickly had his book reprinted with very minor edits and a new title, “The Wreck of the Titan.” Robertson died three years later; and for a short time, his stature as an obscure author was elevated to a more lofty station in life — as an oracle of the seas.

Read related articles: Books on the Titanic, Titanic by the Numbers, Phrases Associated with the Titanic

The Wreck of the Titan, or Futility by Morgan Robertson, Buccaneer Books (1991) originally published in 1898.

Best Books on the Titanic

As the Titanic’s ill-fated maiden voyage celebrates its 100th anniversary, it will be commemorated by the release of Cameron’s 3-hour epic film, Titanic, in 3D. Miles Morgan Travel, based in England, has planned a a Titanic Memorial Cruise – 100th Anniversary Voyage aboard the Balmoral (owned by Fred.Olsen Cruise Lines), that will follow the exact same travel itinerary (hopefully dodging any menacing icebergs this time around) and dining from the same menu. Leaving Southampton on April 8, the ship will cross the Atlantic to arrive above the wreckage of the Titanic on April 14 and 15 (holding a memorial service at 2:20 am) and then head to Halifax, Nova Scotia and arrive in New York on April 20th. Inside staterooms run $999; ocean view staterooms run $5,200; suites run $2,999. An extravagant cruise isn’t for everyone — it’s a good thing that there is no shortage of interesting and affordable books for landlubbers:

Life Titanic: The Tragedy that Shook the World: One Century Later by the editors of Life, Life (2012): One of the most up-to-date books on the subject drawing from recent research as well as archival material. This over-sized book also features a special section on the 3D version of the Cameron’s blockbuster, Titanic, and includes first-person accounts of that fateful night. The editors chose the presentation of very large photos over detailed, comprehensive text: with only 144 pages this book fucntions as a very capable overview.

The Titanic Experience: The Legend of the Unsinkable Ship by Beau Riffenburgh, Carlton (2009) and Metro Books (Centenary Edition, 2011). The only interactive book, it contains removable documents — facsimiles of baggage ticket, White Star ad, blueprint, postcard, telegrams, and memos — as well as beautiful illustrations and photographs that bring history alive. The book does an excellent job of summarizing much of what we know about the Titanic over the past century. Although a short book (64 pages) it is very comprehensive in terms of what it covers: the conception, construction, launch and voyage of the ship, the passengers, the collision, as well as the prophecies of the accident, the aftermath of the tragedy and its legacy. Like a DK Eyewitness book, the book features very interesting and visually compelling layouts.

Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster, Crown (2012). One of the most respected (and prolific) Titanic historians writes a very detailed, scholarly but accessible, narrative of the Titanic’s maiden voyage focusing on the ethos of the gilded age and its people, specifically a handful of first-class passengers. It allows the reader to really experience the maiden voyage as witnessed by those privileged to travel in the lap of luxury. The book also features 100 photographs, some that have never been published before.

Titanic in Photographs by Daniel Klistorner and Steve Hall, The History Press (2012). Written by two Titanic experts, this oversized book features stunning new photos of the gigantic ship, during and after construction. As with the Brewster book, many of these photos have never been published before. Sadly, no extensive set of photos were ever taken of the Titanic’s interior; however the authors present 30 photos of her interior, supplemented by a few photos of her sister ship, the Olympic (built at the same time by Harland and Wolff)) to give the reader a sense of the extravagance of its interior. This is the first book in over a century to tell the Titanic story largely through some of the best archival photographs.

Titanic by Simon Adams, Dorling Kindersley (2009). Part of DK’s Eyewitness library that has been hailed as a “museum between covers,” the book presents a comprehensive history of the times, the ship, the passengers and the aftermath through compelling images and succinct text. No publisher creates books as beautiful, well-researched, and as informative and entertaining as DK — you can simply open the book at any point and dive right in to learn about the subject matter. The book contains a CDROM with photos that are used in the book.

The Rough Guide to the Titanic by Greg Ward, Rough Guides (2012). Like all the Rough Guides, this book doesn’t include a lot of photos, but it is packed with the latest research on every aspect of the Titanic story. The book does include a few diagrams and maps, but its real value is in the writing and lively presentation of the facts (a hallmark of Rough Guides). It could easily be considered the most succinct, yet most comprehensive, review of Titanic literature without the narrative detail of other books. It also contains very helpful supplementary information (the impact of Titanic on culture) and extensive bibliography.

Lost Voices from the Titanic: The Definitive Oral History by Nick Barratt (2010). What better way to learn about the Titanic’s final moments than from the survivors themselves. Historian Nick Barratt presents the survivors’ emotional, heartwrenching stories without any neat narrative packaging. As with any story told from different points of views there are, of course, inconsistencies and disagreements. Barratt leaves it to the reader to sort out the conflicting details, accusations, and assumptions. Unlike most of the Titanic corpus, written in an objective and detached manner, the material in this book is very emotional and evocative.

Inside the Titanic: A Giant Cutaway Book by Ken Marschall and Hugh Brewster, Madison Press Book (1997). Although technically a children’s book, this book depicts in detail the labyrinthine inner structure of the largest ship in the world for its time. It is one of the only books that gives you a complete view of the immensity, complexity, and grandeur of the ship through impressive and well-researched cut-away views that would be impossible to achieve through traditional photography.

Story of the Titanic by Eric Kentley and Steve Noon, Dorling Kindersley (2012). Again, another children’s book, but like Marschall and Brewser’s book above, shows revealing cut-away views (but not as detailed as the Marshall book) of the ship as well as presenting an up-to-date brief — but comprehensive — story of the Titanic from building to aftermath. As with any DK book, the photos and presentation is very compelling and engaging for both children and adults.

882 1/2 Amazing Answers to Your Questions About the Titanic by Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter, Scholastic Press (2012). Again, another children’s book, but if you want to skip the detailed narrative and historical background and get right down to the factoids, this book delivers in less than 100 pages. If you have a question about the Titanic this book probably answers it.

Read related posts: Futility (the book that predicted the Titanic disaster), The Titanic by the Numbers, Phrases Associated with the Titanic

The Best Books on Casablanca

As Casablanca celebrates its 70th anniversary it returns to the big screen for a limited time as well as to the small screen (a limited collector’s edition blu-ray/dvd combo). Once you’ve seen the movie, it’s time to curl up with a good book on the subject and see this beloved classic in a new light. To find the best in books, we have rounded up the usual suspects:

Casablanca: The Complete Script and Legend Behind the Film by Howard Koch, Easton Press (2012). Just like the film, an Easton Press book — bound in genuine leather , 22kt gold accents stamped into the hubbed spine, satin-ribbon page marker, and beautifully printed — is an absolute treasure. This heirloom-quality edition is based on the paperback issued in 1995. If you have never owned an Easton Press before, treat yourself — otherwise, as Rick said, “you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.”

Casablanca: As Time Goes By (50th Anniversary Commemorative) by Frank Miller, Turner Publishing (1992). One of the best illustrated books on the subject with extensive photos, memos, blueprints, and posters.

Round up the Usual Suspects: The Making of Casablanca — Bogart, Bergman & World War II by Aljean Harmetz, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1993). The most in-depth and comprehensive inside story of the making of the film. Includes many reproductions of key production memos and notes. A paperback version, titled The Making of Casablanca, was issued in 2002.

Casablanca: Behind the Scenes by Harlan Lebo with a Foreword by Julius Epstein, Touchstone (1992). The book begins with a fascinating interview with one of the screenwriters of the film, Julius Epstein, providing some insight into the Hollywood studio system of the early days of American cinema. The book covers much of the well-known history of the book drawing on the archives of Warner Brothers.

The Casablanca Companion: The Movie and More by Jeff Siegel, Taylor Publishing (1992). This is the shortest of all the books, but what it loses in length, it makes up in content. The book is jam-packed with all delicious trivia that you will not find anywhere else — including IMDB and wikipedia. The book includes several quizzes for devoted Casablanca aficionados.

The World’s Most Expensive Book: $23.9 Million

Leave it to an evolutionary biologist, Michael Eisen at UC Berkeley, to stumble upon and turn his microcope on the mysterious upward spiral pricing algorithm implemented by booksellers on Amazon that caused a relatively obscure title like The Making of a Fly by Peter Lawrence to be listed at $23,698,655.93! For that staggering price you would expect free shipping, but alas, the buyer needs to have deep enough pockets to fork over another $3.99 for shipping. Evidently, a book this valuable does not require insurance or proof of delivery.

Eisen uses his keen scientific and investigative skills to systematically track the competing values of the book offered by two booksellers and discovers the underlying multiplier that the retailers are using to increase the cost of the book — on the fly (that magic number happens to be 1.270589). Because retailers generally want to offer the lowest price, this ceaseless increase in price puzzles Eisen. After carefully examining the pattern, he surmises that one of the retailers does not actually own the book and is using another seller’s inventory and price to determine its own higher price — thus an upward pricing spiral that, over time, flies in the face of commonsense and credulity. As Eisen points out, the algorithms did not have built-in sanity checks. Thus, a book on flies that should have been selling for $100 eventually peaked on April 18, 2011 to a record-setting $23,698,655.93. Talk about runaway inflation.

As one of Eisen’s astute readers notes, this is not really an Amazon problem, but rather the case of two sellers that are using simple automatic software pricing bots (provided by third party companies) that adjust the book’s price based on its current lowest or highest selling price. “Oftentimes a grossly inflated price,” he writes, “is just a quirk in the program and the seller’s software re-pricing program kicks in to match the other seller’s price.” In other words, the fly in the ointment — ahem — is this pesky little pricing program. Some fly-by-night retailers play this automated price adjustment game (generally a difference of $.01) in an infinite loop until some unsuspecting consumer purchases the book (or if it exceeds Amazon’s integer overflow parameters).

One can only wonder if William Golding would fly off the handle knowing that a treasured first edition of his classic novel, Lord of the Flies, published in 1954 is valued at a mere $20,000 — a tiny fraction of the value of a modern textbook on the lowly drosophila.

For further reading: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358

You Are Your Words. Make the Most of Them.

It has been over a decade since the last edition of the American Heritage Dictionary (the 4th edition was published in 2000 and updated in 2006). You would think that with the ubiquity of all-digital dictionaries lurking in desktop computers, laptops, and mobile devices that the hefty printed dictionary was all but extinct. But there it is in all its wordly splendor, weighing in at 7 pounds: 2,112 pages pages, over 210,000 entries, over 4,000 illustrations, and sporting the traditional and helpful thumb index. (Compare to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th edition, that contains over 500,000 definitions in 3,472 pages in two volumes.) The cover features a tagline that concretely justifies spending money on — and time with — a dictionary: “You are Your Words. Make the Most of Them.” Well said and infinitely true. Beyond being judged initially by appearance, people are judged by how they express themselves.

The editors of the AHD are a bit more hip than their counterparts across the pond, hence the early inclusion of colorful and sometimes very American vernacular. The new edition includes new words like crowdsourcing, exoplanet, kiteboarding, ginormous, LOL, slider, and wifty. For obvious reasons, don’t expect to find the words ipad, Kindle, or Nook in this up-to-date dictionary (the editors know where to draw the line).

The joy of owning a printed dictionary is that the entire English language (or at least most of it) can be held in yours hands. I generally look up a word at least once a day, and the way to expand your vocabulary quickly is by serendipity — looking at the words around your target words. A dictionary should never be read cover to cover (unless, of course, you are Ammon Shea, who read the entire OED in one year — more on that later), but it should be browsed or explored from time to time. The beauty of the English language is that it is alive and constantly evolving, adapting and the printed dictionary is merely a snapshot of the lexicographic record at one moment. Seize the moment and make the most of these words.

American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2011).

Why Read Moby Dick?

Melville’s magnum opus, dedicated to his good friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne (“In token of my admiration of his genius”) begins with a deceptively simple introduction, “Call me Ishmael” but then quickly begins its journey deep into the complex psyche of Ahab and his quest for the great white whale — one of literature’s most powerful, multi-faceted symbols.

To the younger generation Moby-Dick may be mistakenly identified with either a music artist or some bizarre sex toy, but four centuries later is still considered the Great American Novel, a masterful exploration of Man’s epic struggle with Evil. The brilliant literary critic, Clifton Fadiman, eloquently praises the genius of Melville: “The greatest books rise from a profound level of wonder and terror, a level common to all humanity in all times and climes, but a level so deep that we are only at times aware of it, and none of us can ever glimpse it whole. From time to time a man lets down into this deep well the glorious, pitiful bucket of his genius, and he brings up a book, and then we read it, and dimly we sense its source, and know that source to be something profound and permanent in the human imagination. The mysterious liquid drawn from this well is never crystalline. Rather does each man, as he looks into it, see mirrored a different set of images, reflections, points of light, and layers of shadow. All great books are symbolical myths, overlaid like a palimpsest with the meanings that men at various times assign to them.”

To mark the 400th anniversary of Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Philbrick, a member of the Nantucket Historical Association, asks the modern reader: Why Read Moby Dick? Indeed, the novel is as relevant today as it was in 1851. Moby Dick can be appreciated on so many levels (literature, poetry, history, religion, philosophy, and of course, cetology)  and it is Philbrick’s mission to introduce this masterpiece to new audiences, so that modern readers can look into it, as Fadiman suggests, and find new meanings that reflect and mirror the current milieu.

Why Read Moby Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick, Viking Press (2011); Clifton Fadiman excerpt from Moby Dick or The Whale by Herman Melville, Easton Press (1977).

The Life of Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens was born on February 7, 1812. As the 200th anniversary of his the author’s birth approaches, Sterling Publishing has lovingly produced an abridged and illustrated one-volume edition of John Forster’s monumental biography of Dickens. The original biography was published as a 3-volume set by Chapman and Hall: the first volume was completed in 1872, two years after Dickens’ death; the second in 1873, and the third in 1874. The book was reprinted with corrections from Forster before his death in 1876. The last version of this biography was printed in London by J.M. Dent in 1969. Since then, the book has been out of print; however a digital version of an American edition (Estes and Lauriat Publishers, Boston, 1872) can be found on Google Books.

Dickens and Forster met in 1837 and were eager to meet one another. They quickly forged an enduring friendship and Forster became Dickens most trusted advisor with respect to his writing career. Just about everything that Dickens ever wrote had been read, reviewed and corrected by Forster. For over 30 years, this biographer studied and recorded the life of his subject to write the first and most comprehensive biography of Dickens, forming the basis of all subsequent biographies of Dickens, most notably Peter Ackroyd’s monumental Dickens published in 1990 by Harper Collins.

The book features a foreword by Jane Smiley who recently wrote a brief biography of Dickens for Penguin in 2002 as part of the short-lived Penguin Lives series. There is an introduction by editor Holly Furneaux that illuminates the special Dickens-Forster friendship. Adorning many of the pages are photos of first editions of Dickens’ works as well as carefully selected images from the Charles Dickens Museum.

The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, Sterling Publishing (2011).