Days before the Titanic struck an iceberg, a first-class passenger, Col. Archibald Gracie, described the vessel in a letter written while on board: “It is a fine ship but I shall await my journey’s end before I pass judgment on her.” Colonel Gracie’s journey on the Titanic had a catastrophic end, but he fared better…
Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems. At 13, Charlotte Brontë collected her verse in a humble anthology that already hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience. Written in the winter of 1829, the poems in Brontë’s “Book of Rhymes”…
In its heyday in the 1950s and ’60s, the Lung Wah Hotel, a converted, Spanish revival villa, offered a leafy refuge from the bustle of city life, near a cove and surrounded by parks in Hong Kong’s northern New Territories. Winding stairs, flanked by red lanterns, led to a sprawling Chinese-style garden. On summer weekends,…
Jordan Tkacsik was perusing his friend Paul Bartlett’s sports memorabilia and trading card shop last year when he noticed something unusual in a section full of Pokémon collectibles. It was a Cheetos cheese puff, but not just any Cheeto. Rather, it was a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto that bore an uncanny resemblance to Charizard, an orange…
A former Postal Service worker admitted this week that he stole valuable sports collectibles, including Michael Jordan trading cards, an autographed photo of the tennis star Rafael Nadal and a Mickey Mantle card, while he was working as a sorting clerk at a post office in New Jersey, federal prosecutors said. The items, collectively estimated…