Robert Ballard's book about the Titanic's discovery, due out next month as well. That book's gone through six printings, sold 60,000 hard-back copies and is coming out in paperback next month. And last year, after three decades of correspondence with Titanic survivors and buffs, rethinking some old theories and unearthing new facts, Lord came out with a sequel, 'The Night Continues,' updating the Titanic story. It has been made into a movie (in 1958, starring Kenneth More). Thirty-three years, 54 printings (nine in hard back) and millions of copies later, 'Night' is still selling well, refueled (if refueling were needed) by discovery of the liner's shattered hull two years ago. The result, a year later, was 'A Night to Remember,' the first and still the best telling of the Titanic's history. Walter Thompson - an editor friend advised him, since he was always talking about the Titanic, to write a book about it.

Finally, in 1953 - while he was working as an advertising copywriter on the Aqua Velva account at J.

investigation into the sinking during law school at Yale. He exhumed old newspaper clippings on the Titanic in the Princeton library as an undergraduate and read transcripts of the U.S. At 8 he started a scrapbook about the Titanic and, in a way, he has been sailing with her ever since. Lord made his first Atlantic crossing 14 years later, at age 7, on the White Star liner Olympic - quite conscious even then, he recalls, that the Olympic was the Titanic's sister ship. Her story was a staple of family lore, he remembers, as were tales, both cautionary and heroic, of the icy, starry night in 1912 when Smith and his great ship went down. 'But she made her decision, whatever it was, the first night out.' 'I don't remember whether it was my father's proposal or somebody else's,' Lord mused not long ago, the summer sun heliographing off his eyeglasses like an SOS. Smith, and sent Lord's mother to sea once under Smith's care to make up her mind about a marriage proposal. His grandfather, a Baltimore business baron with steel, railroad and shipping interests, was a personal friend of the ship's captain, Edward J. Walter Lord was into the Titanic before he was born.

The Night Lives On by Walter Lord