Books: Queen Victoria's 40 years of mourning Albert

Members of the royal household would not appear in public without their all-black clothes for a year, while she intended to wear her widow weeds for the rest of her life. And except for occasionally donning white lace, ermine, diamonds and pearls for official functions, that is exactly what she did until her own death in 1901.

Helen Rappaport, a historian whose previous works include The Last Days of the Romanovs, has written a splendid new book that focuses on the roughly 10-year period just before and after Albert's untimely death at age 42.

Relying on forgotten letters, memoirs and diaries, she explores Victoria's obsessive love for Albert, her pathological reaction to his death and the 40 years she spent commemorating him, sparking a craze for mourning-related memorabilia including fashionable jet jewelry. She also argues that Albert may have died of Crohn's disease, not typhoid fever, listed as the official cause of death.

Eventually, Rappaport explains, Victoria did emerge from her decade of seclusion to resume some of her public duties. Rappaport believes this was due in no small measure to the ministrations of her devoted Scottish servant John Brown.

Two other events also helped jolt Victoria back to reality _ her eldest son's near fatal illness in 1871 and a half-baked attempt to assassinate her a few months later. Both prompted an outpouring of public support, making the self-centered queen realize that she owed it to her loyal subjects to engage in the royal spectacle they craved. It was just in time, too. Republican sentiment was building as the British public increasingly questioned their huge expenditures for the royals.

Ironically, strait-laced Albert likely would have disapproved of the orgy of grief after his death. Although he, too, shared the era's taste for death rituals, he had tried to teach his ruling partner how to be a just and sober-minded queen.

Following the outpouring of memorials in 1852 for the Duke of Wellington, the namesake of Royal Albert Hall and countless other monuments, buildings and statues told his wife, "If I should die before you, do not, I beg, raise even a single marble image to my name.''

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To purchase the book through amazon.com, go to:

www.amazon.com/Magnificent-Obsession-Victoria-Changed-Monarchy/dp/0312621051

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Bookstore to sell rare volume 'predicting' Titanic's fate

Except The Titan is a fictional ship, and author Morgan Robertson first published his novella, Futility, in 1898—14 years before the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 14, 1912.

The similarities between Robertson's plot and real life have given Futility an uncanny reputation among cognoscenti, with references popping up in everything from Walter Lord's 1955 nonfiction account of the Titanic sinking, A Night to Remember, to Alan Moore's graphic novel A League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The Doctor Who audio play The Wreck of the Titan is partly based on Robertson's novella.

“If you have any interest in the Titanic, it's a must-have,” said Mark Dimunation, chief of the rare books and special collections department at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. “It's a great collectible book and there's this odd aspect to it makes it completely interesting.”

But while you'll see a fictional copy in the video game “Titanic: Adventure Out of Time,” very few copies of the 1898 edition still exist. (After the sinking of the Titanic, Robertson re-released Futility in 1912 with a new subtitle, The Wreck of the Titan.)

The Library of Congress has a copy, as does the British Library and a few other private libraries. And so does Vaughn Baber, owner of Bicentennial Books, Kalamazoo's oldest used bookstore.

Baber, 83, said he found his copy 25 years ago in a used bookstore in St. Petersburg, Fla. Aware of its rarity, he snapped up the copy, which had a sticker price of $3.

“He didn't know what he had,” Baber said of the owner of The Lighthouse bookstore. Baber and his wife, Arlene, have decided that the centennial of the Titanic's sinking in April makes it the right time to sell Futility. While they have not yet settled on a venue, Baber believes an auction will generate the most interest.

“I challenge you to find another copy,” Baber said inside his 35-year-old store on Westnedge Ave., with books filling the floor-to-ceiling shelves and spilling onto the floor.

There are no other copies currently for sale in the United States, according to both Dimunation and Joyce Kosofsky, a rare books expert at the Brattle Book Shop in Boston, one of the oldest antiquarian bookshops in the U.S. Kosofsky said that the last available copy of Futility sold at auction in October 2010 for $2,200.

“That's a hammer price,” said Kosofsky, which she says is more useful in determining value than an appraisal.

It's not clear whether that copy's condition was similar to Baber's, which is in very good shape for a 114-year-old book, with an inside water stain as the only visible blemish. The machine-press cover shows a picture of an ocean liner sinking beneath the waves with an iceberg behind it.

It's not first Shakespeare folio money, and one page of an original 1456 Gutenberg Bible would fetch more than 10 times more. But “that's a good price for a book,” said Kosofsky.

Baber doesn't think so. “I won't sell this for less than $10,000,” he said. “Particularly now with the centennial and the sinking of the Costa Concordia.”

In fact, he said he turned down an offer about a year ago for $6,500.

While Dimunation did not set a dollar amount on Baber's copy, he thinks Baber should expect a “bump” because of the anniversary.

“Now in the year of the centennial, anything Titanic is extraordinarily collectible,” he said. “The text itself is of great interest to people, to have the first printing ... makes it a highly desirable to a certain audience. It's a lovely piece in that regard.”

When asked if Futility is the rarest edition he's ever owned, Baber said, “in 35 years, there have been many old books.”

Another memorable title was Experiments and Observations on Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion, written in 1833 by William Beaumont, a 19th-century U.S. Army surgeon who served on Mackinac Island and is known as the father of gastric physiology.

Arlene Baber actually found that copy, while waiting for Vaughn in a bookstore.

“I was kind of bored waiting, so I said `Here's an old book' and pulled it off the shelf," she remembered.

That copy was purchased for Western Michigan University's library, where it was presented as the 1 millionth volume, the Babers said.

Robertson wrote his novella with a pen, not a Ouija board, and there are differences between his narrative and the actual sinking. Most notably, 705 passengers are reported to have survived the wreck of the Titanic; only 13 survived Robertson's Titan. The Titanic was on its way to New York when it sank; the Titan was headed the opposite direction on it way to Europe. The Titan strikes the ice head on; the Titanic, which tried to turn to avoid the iceberg, took a glancing blow that tore open its side. The Titanic took about three hours to sink; the Titan disappeared under the waves in five minutes.

But the similarities are striking.

“I challenge anyone not to raise an eyebrow,” said Dimunation. “It's all within inches of being completely identical.”

In fact, the events are so similar that Lord prefaced A Night to Remember, with a comparison of the real and fictional events.

“In 1898, a struggling author named Morgan Robertson concocted a novel about a fabulous Atlantic liner, far larger than any that had ever been built. Robertson loaded his ship with the rich and complacent and then wrecked it one cold April night on an iceberg,” Lord wrote. “Fourteen years later, a British shipping company named the White Star Line built a steamer remarkably like the one in Robertson's novel. ... The real ship was 882.5 feet long; the fictional one was 800 feet. Both vessels were triple screw and could make 24-25 knots. Both could carry about 3,000 people, and both had enough lifeboats for only a fraction of this number. But, then, this didn't seem to matter because both were labeled, ‘unsinkable.’”

Baber won't be the only collector celebrating the Titanic centennial with an auction. In April, some 5,500 artifacts from the shipwreck go up for bidding at Guernsey's, a New York auction house, the Associated Press reported in December. The artifacts, which are the largest Titanic collection in existence and include china, a diamond necklace, ship's instruments and a portion of the hull, appraised for $189 million.

Prospective bidders hoping to pick up a ticket or a teacup are out of luck: The artifacts are to be sold together as a winner-take-all auction and the winning bidder must abide by court-ordered covenants regarding the historical trove. According to a 2010 court ruling, the collection must be made available “for public display and exhibition, scientific and scholarly research and educational purposes.”

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Information from: Kalamazoo Gazette, http://www.mlive.com/kalamazoo

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Author tells tale of Klimt’s famed Bloch-Bauer portrait

As Washington Post journalist Anne-Marie O'Connor relates in her painstakingly researched history of the case, it would take 68 years and a massive legal fight before descendants succeeded in reclaiming the art from the Austrian government. The bureaucratic stonewalling and politically motivated bad faith they encountered added insult to the tragedy of the Holocaust. But through the tireless efforts of figures including American attorney E. Randol Schoenberg, who spearheaded the recovery effort, justice was eventually done. O'Connor's narrative is enriched by extensive interviews and a remarkable trove of family correspondence.

The Lady in Gold paints a vivid picture of Vienna's prewar Jewish intelligentsia, the artistic career of Klimt, the horrifying rise of Nazism and the complexities of international law and art restitution.

Visitors to New York's Neue Galerie, where the Bloch-Bauer portrait has been on display since its purchase by billionaire Ronald Lauder for a record $135 million in 2006, will be familiar with the sparkling, seductive image. But O'Connor's fascinating tale of beauty, terror, loss and remembrance reveals a deeper truth beneath the golden surface.

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Jonathan Lopez is editor-at-large of Art & Antiques.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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Darker past of Bangkok's American 'Silk King' emerges

Credited with the revival of a now booming silk industry, Thompson attained legendary status, enhanced by a bon vivant lifestyle at a time when Thailand was still truly exotic—and by his mysterious death. But little has been known about Thompson's intensely political, darker side—his freelance backing of Asia's insurgencies, clashes with Washington's Cold War warriors and his connections to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which to this day reportedly refuses to release his complete file.

It's the cloak and dagger stuff, rather than the glitz and glamour, that's the focus of The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War by Joshua Kurlantzick, an author on Asian affairs with the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

The book provides no new clues about Thompson's vacation walk into a Malaysian jungle in 1967 from which he never returned. Numerous theories range from his having been eaten by a tiger to abduction by U.S. intelligence agents.

But Kurlantzick says he uncovered a trove of other information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, departments of Defense and State and other U.S. government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act as well as unclassified material available, but mostly untapped, in the National Archives.

From this, emerges a portrait of Thompson as a U.S Army officer in the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, who stood ardently behind America's immediate post-World War II policy of championing democracy and ridding the world of colonialism. He believed Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist who should be supported, and almost worshipped Pridi Banomyong, Thailand's pro-democracy statesman.

But Washington executed an about-turn and began to back assorted Asian strongmen and the French in colonial Indochina—“a scurvy race” he called them—on grounds that it was fighting the greater menace of Communism. Thompson became disillusioned and angry.

He was devastated when Pridi was ousted in a coup followed by the killings of many of his followers and a succession of thuggish leaders from the military, which remains a powerful force in Thai politics to this day.

“I wanted to use Jim to broaden the story to Thailand's relations with the United States, and to explore this whole generation of those who had come out of the OSS in World War II and then were pushed out by the Cold War,” Kurlantzick said in an interview.

Scion of a wealthy East Coast establishment family, educated at Princeton University, James H.W. Thompson dabbled in architecture and partied in New York before volunteering for the army. A wartime marriage ended in divorce. Serving with distinction in North Africa and Europe, he was about to parachute into Thailand with an OSS team when the war ended.

In Thailand, Thompson became deeply involved with Lao, Cambodian and Vietnamese insurgents who used the country as a base in fighting the French, helping to supply weapons and serving as a go-between, often acting without approval from headquarters. Although discharged in 1946, Thompson continued to “serve as a de facto intelligence officer,” Kurlantzick says, one useful to all sides until the radical shift in U.S. policy when he and other colleagues in the OSS found themselves on the “wrong side.”

“Jim was an idealist, a romantic, an anti-imperialist and there was no more idealistic time than just after the war,” the book quotes a one-time U.S. diplomat, Rolland Bushier, as saying.

America's secret entry into the war in Laos in the early 1960s finally destroyed his vision of “an America that used its power to build democracy in the region, that could distinguish between local grievances and global communism, and that inspired Asians as a liberator, not as a new colonizer.”

Like a number of like-minded Americans at the time, Thompson was investigated by the FBI for suspected “un-American activities,” and “although Thompson once had been extremely valuable to U.S. intelligence, the agency finally put out a ‘burn notice,’ on him, warning all employees to stay away from him,” the book notes.

By this time, he had started The Thai Silk Co., reviving a largely moribund industry, helping thousands of poor villagers in the process and introducing Thai silk to the world. Dinners at his traditional Thai home, filled with antiques he had collected, became a must-do for visiting celebrities, diplomats, spies and journalists, many of whom described them, and Thompson's personality, as unforgettable.

A number of those who knew him personally have recalled a more optimistic, upbeat individual than portrayed in the book, and almost certainly it isn't his politics that is now remembered by most.

“Jim may have disappeared decades ago but he remains alive today through the legacy of his great silk products, the help his company still gives poor rural folk and through the preservation of Thailand's rich artistic heritage,” says William J. Klausner, president of The James H. W. Thompson Foundation, which serves as caretaker of his residence-museum and promotes Thai culture.

Kurlantzick says Thompson was a “multifaceted, generous and foresighted man, but he was in some ways too idealistic, bordering on the naive and it became his downfall in many ways.”

Toward the end, aged 61, Thompson felt the hopes of his generation had been dashed, the old Asia he loved was fast becoming too Westernized, and the most passionate love affair of his life, with the wife of an American diplomat, had ended. Like other expatriates, he could never go home again, and yet sensed that he would never become truly Thai.

Perhaps, the book suggests, the real tragedy befell Thompson before his disappearance.

Copyright 2012 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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