Titanic letters to be auctioned

Letters from Titanic passengers up for auction

Two letters from Titanic passengers are to be auctioned in New York this month, one of them featuring an excited description of the doomed ship just moments before setting sail.

Letters on White Star Lines stationery inscribed with "On board RMS Titanic"are "extremely rare and are among the most prized artefacts from the disaster," said Robert Litzenberger, a specialist at Spink Smythe auction house. The sale will be held on January 16, and the letters are expected to sell for between ten thousand and twenty thousand dollars each.

One is a hurried note scribbled by businessman Adolphe Saalfeld to his wife just before the Titanic left Southampton on her 1912 maiden voyage. "I just had an hours roaming abt on this wonderful boat," he wrote. He approved highly of his cabin, which was "like a bed-sitting room and rather large."

Saalfeld survived the sinking in lifeboat number three, which was crammed mostly with women and children.

The other letter was written by George Graham, a department store salesman,who perished. In a brief letter sent just before embarking, he apologized to a business associate that he had been too busy to make contact earlier, and added, "I hope that you will accept my good wishes now even if they are a bit late. I hope to see you next year."

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1:16 PM | 0 comments

Terry Pratchett Knighted

Terrific news -- the BBC reports that author Terry Pratchett, whose novels have sold millions of copies worldwide, has been created a knight in the New Year Honours list, for services to literature.

As previously reported, Sir Terry received the terrible news earlier this year that his erratic memory has been diagnosed as a symptom of Altzheimer's disease. He has since campaigned vigorously to raise public awareness of the condition.

He is known throughout the world for the 36-volume Discworld series, which has been translated into thirty-three languages. The first, The Colour of Magic (1983) appeared as a truly colorful television film last year, and was enjoyed by an audience of thousands down here in New Zealand, where we know what to look for, New Zealand being the home of special effects.

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12:39 PM | 0 comments

I missed a birthday!

Well, good lord, how could have missed it? Pulp romantic fiction publisher Mills & Boon batted its century on 28 November, and I didn't even notice.

And yet it is such an amazing success story. Just look at the statistics! Mills & Boon report a UK book sale every three seconds, with 130 million sales globally every year. The books are translated, too, and published in 26 countries.

One thousand, three hundred Mills & Boon authors labor at their computers to produce four books each per annum, to meet an apparently insatiable demand for their work.

The economic downturn has actually worked in their favor -- sales of romantic fiction are rising as people look for happy endings. As editorial director Karin Stoecker reveals, "Generally speaking, we have been quite successful in gloomier economic times." When budgets are tight and newspaper headlines dire, "It's a value-priced entertaining escape from otherwise harsh realities."

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11:59 AM | 0 comments

Can a man write romantic pulp fiction?

"Can a man really write a Mills & Boon?" asks the BBC newsletter in the arts and entertainment section. (American readers, think "Harlequin.")

Apparently a broad-shouldered Yorkshireman who goes weight training three times a week, climbs mountains in the weekends, and enjoys a drink with his rugby-playing friends churns out four romances a year, and sees his work do well in 26 different countries.

Now an active member of the Romantic Novelists' Association, Roger Sanderson (pictured) would have been a soldier if life hadn't beckoned him in another direction. He was making a sort of living out of writing scripts for commando comics when he just happened to pick up one of his daughter's Mills & Boons, and was hooked. Initially, he co-wrote with his wife Gill, but soon took over her name and did it alone.

"Today," as BBC writer Peter Jackson reveals in the story, "he specialises in medical romances, setting many of his stories in the Lake District around chisel-jawed doctors, with hearts either beating or melting."

Roger reckons he has all the qualifications, being happily married and knowing what it is like to be in love. But how does he know what it is like for a woman to be in love? That, he admits, is difficult. Men like to know how physical things work, while women are interested in relationships and what makes them work.

An unusual success story, which poses a couple of questions. Does Roger tell his rugby mates what he does to make a living? And is he the only male who writes for Mills & Boon (or Harlequin)? I seem to have a vague memory of a bloke in Tasmania who wrote under the name of Victoria Gordon.

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11:38 AM | 0 comments

O for Obama

President-elect Barack Obama has selected Yale's Elizabeth Alexander to write and read a poem for his inauguration on 20 January. Intrigued by the news (because I had never heard of her, I admit, shamefaced), I looked up her works, and have decided that he has made an excellent choice.

I have a favorite work already. It is The Venus Hottentot, which begins with an ode to a microscope. Wonderfully evocative, it brought back vivid memories of the wonders that are gradually revealed when a slide with even the humblest smear beneath the cover slip is slid under the lens, and the magnification is adjusted.

Science, science, science!

Everything is beautiful

blown up beneath my glass

Colors dazzle insect wings.

A drop of water swirls

like marble. Ordinary

crumbs become stalactites

set in perfect angles

of geometry I'd thought

impossible. Few will

ever see what I see

through this microscope.

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1:58 PM | 0 comments

EU online library reopens

The BBC has announced that the European Union's digital library, europeana, which crashed soon after its launch on 20 November -- apparently because so many people wanted to have a look at the Mona Lisa online -- has been resuscitated.

The Mona Lisa! Why not books or promotional packaging, for heaven's sake? It's not as if the iconic painting doesn't pop up all the time in the traditional media!

When our boys were nine and eleven, we carted them around the art museums of Europe for five months, an interesting experience for me, as at the entrance to each great gallery I asked them to choose which painting they would buy if they were unimaginably rich. Their choices were fascinating. The only predictable one was the Mona Lisa, and when I asked why, I was told it was because that was the picture advertising a certain brand of television. With constant exposure, it had become warm and familiar, apparently.

But to return to the topic. The site, which gives multilingual access to cultural collections across the European Union, was swamped by users on its launch, with a volume of ten million hits an hour. Now that it's server capacity has been quadrupled, they are trying again, but don't guarantee that "the user experience" will be "optimal."

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1:18 PM | 0 comments

Winnie the Pooh for King!

In these hard times, it was a delight to read heartwarming news in the BBC arts and culture section -- that the favorite of childhood bedtimes, Winnie the Pooh, has performed magnificently at Sotheby's.

A collection of E H Shepard's original drawings for the children's books has fetched one-point-two-six million pounds at auction.

"He went on tracking, and Piglet ... ran after him," one of Shepard's best-loved works, went for 115,250 pounds, while "Bump, bump, bump ... going up the stairs," fetched almost double the estimated price at 97,250 pounds.

The sale also included limited edition and signed books by the author, A A Milne, plus a first US edition, dated 1926, and inscribed by Milne to Shepard, which also went for almost double the estimate of twenty thousand pounds.

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12:05 PM | 0 comments