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Title: The Titanic : Historiography and Annotated Bibliography by Eugene L. Rasor ISBN: 0-313-31215-X Publisher: Greenwood Publishing Group Pub. Date: 30 September, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $83.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)

Rating: 3
Summary: A good historiography suffers from a mediocre bibliography
Comment: The author is a professional bibliographer with some 11 bibliographies to his credit. As such, his Titanic bibliography has both the strengths and weaknesses of someone knowledgeable in bibliography, if not necessarily in Titanic; or, at least that was my impression.

The work is split into three parts, a historical narrative, descriptive subject lists, and the annotated book list.

Parts one and two are quite well done with extensive descriptive text in general references, history, background and context. The subject lists are also extensive covering in excellent detail such diverse items as paintings, sermons, poems and memorabilia. There is excellent discussion of movies, museums, societies and journals, amongst others. An exception is the Internet, which is very poorly represented.

The book list, however, is the most important part of any bibliography, and here things are a bit more problematic. There are indexes for authors and subjects, but not for titles, for example. Another surprising omission is the lack of isbn numbers. Also missing are illustrations of any kind; there are no photos of book covers or title pages that one would expect to find in this kind of work. Neither will you find a guide to identifying first printings, nor a guide to values.

Some of the issues that crop up from, what I assume is the author's inexperience with the subject include a few humorous mistakes, such as identifying William Barnes' book as a biography of Thomas Andrews. Also Martin Gardner's book is identified as a pro-psychic work, when it is quite the opposite. A few other quirks include identifying Charles Lightoller as the ship's First Officer (he was actually the Second Officer); and the Carpathia's name gets mangled as Carpathian a few times in the text.

Other faux pas include, in the descriptive text, crediting Eaton but not Haas for Falling Star, yet crediting Haas but not Eaton for A Journey through Time (although they are correctly credited in the book list itself).

The book list contains a total of 674 entries. A fair portion of these entries are only marginally related to the subject, however. There are quite a few titles representing generic works on British history, shipbuilding, and maritime history; the Titanic connection is often minimal. There are also a number of works about other famous shipwrecks that really have nothing to do with the subject.

Of more concern than what was included is what was not. A very quick perusal turned up quite a number of titles missing in action, both recent works and some older ones.

Despite these omissions, the book list is quite extensive. It cannot be said to be the definitive list, however. Still, there is a lot more to this work than just a list of books, and on most other fronts this work does a credible job of covering the subject.