Titanic — Amazing and Extraordinary Facts (2012) — Stuart Robertson

David & Charles • ISBN: 9781446301944 • Condition: As New • Offered by Crappy Old Books

Unsinkable trivia, now with better manners. Stuart Robertson’s Titanic — Amazing and Extraordinary Facts is the pocket-sized iceberg of a book that looks small, politely nods, and then proceeds to hoist up an entire ship’s worth of curios, coincidences, design flourishes, menu items, and “wait, really?” moments. It’s the neat companion for anyone who enjoys history served as tapas: dozens of morsels, each delicious, none requiring a lifejacket.

Inside you’ll find the ship built like a palace and marketed like a miracle, with carpets that had opinions, cutlery that could pass inspection, and bathtubs that moonlighted as social status. There are details about lifeboats (too few), deckchairs (too many metaphors), and wireless messages (some heeded, some filed under “later”). Expect cameo appearances by millionaires with monogrammed anxieties, emigrants with astonishing optimism, and crew who could fold a napkin into maritime origami between drills. Robertson drops the good stuff: the curious omens, the wrong turns, the right people in the wrong corridors, and the way the band accidentally became the world’s most solemn soundtrack.

The tone? Breezy but careful—like a well-tailored steward sliding a fact onto your plate and saying, “A little something to go with your sense of disbelief.” You’ll get mini-profiles of notable passengers, sly peeks into Edwardian logistics (how to feed a floating town), and the unlikely afterlives of crockery, postcards, and legend. It’s not a doorstop history; it’s the sharp, fascinating footnote collection that turns you into the person who can’t sit through a Titanic documentary without saying, “Actually…”

Condition: As New, which in our world means: time apparently forgot to turn the pages. The spine is pristine, the corners are unbruised, and the cover looks like it just left the printer with a packed lunch and a note from its mum. If this book has been read, it learned how to do so without creasing anything—Edwardian standards of deportment applied to modern paper.

At Crappy Old Books, we take pride in offering immaculate artefacts with unserious grins. We did not press flowers in it. We did not scrawl “draw me like one of your French books” on the flyleaf. We simply admired its crispness, checked it for the usual nautical nonsense (none present), and decided it deserves an upgrade from “As New” to “Frankly Showing Off.”

Read it and discover that the Titanic is not just a shipwreck; it’s a cultural reef—every diver finds a new souvenir fact: the odd brand of champagne, the bureaucratic decision that aged like milk, the dog that travelled better than most of us. Close the covers and you’ll carry a pocketful of well-polished gems: the kind you can deploy at dinner to impress, distract, or gently win an argument about lifeboat capacity.

File under maritime minutiae, myth maintenance, polite astonishment. Place beside your atlas, your stopwatch, and your belief that good writing can still rescue us from bad outcomes. And when someone asks why you bought another Titanic book, smile and say, “Because legends deserve footnotes—and this one comes As New.”

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