A Night To Remember (book) - Publication History

Publication History

Lord traveled on the RMS Olympic, Titanic's sister ship, when he was a boy and the experience gave him a lifelong fascination with the lost liner. As he later put it, he spent his time on the Olympic "prowling around" and trying to imagine "such a huge thing" sinking. He started reading about and drawing Titanic at the age of ten and spent many years collecting Titanic memorabilia, causing people to "take note of this oddity." He majored in history at Princeton University and graduated from Yale Law School before joining the New York-based advertising agency J. Walter Thompson. Writing in his spare time, he interviewed around sixty survivors of the disaster.

After the publication of his first book about the American Civil War, Lord's literary agent suggested that he write about the Titanic since he knew Lord had researched the subject for his amusement. Lord began his research for the book by going to the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. to read the United States inquiry into the sinking. Realizing that he would have to interview survivors of the disaster to give him a full understanding of the sinking Lord, who was on a tight buget, began writing letters to the editors of various newspapers asking survivors to get in touch with him. Lord sent his letters to papers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Southampton, England, and Belfast, Northern Ireland places he felt people connected to the Titanic would come from. Additionally he was put in touch with survivors through 20th Century Fox, who had just released the 1953 movie Titanic, who had themeselves been in touch with several of the survivors. Lord was eventually able to locate and correspond with nearly 60 survivors.

A Night to Remember was only Lord's second book but was a huge success, thanks in no small part to the aggressive advertising campaign carried out by R & W Holt following its launch in November 1955. The book also undoubtedly benefited from the popularity of the 1953 film Titanic and other coverage of the disaster that was published around the same time. Within two months of its publication, the book had sold 60,000 copies and remained listed as a best-seller for six months. The Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest both published condensed versions and it was selected in June 1956 by the Book of the Month Club. The first paperback edition was published by Bantam Books in October 1956.

Since then the book has never been out of print and has been translated into over a dozen languages. Its success enabled Lord to leave the world of advertising and become a full-time writer. After the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 sparked a new wave of public interest in the disaster he wrote a follow-up book, The Night Lives On (1986). Daniel Allen Butler comments that "although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the world over, it lacked the spark of the original," which by 1998 had reached its fiftieth printing.