HANDS OFF THE TITANIC (And The Californian) Monica O'HARA Pharaoh Press (1989)

Genealogy, newspaper research, official records, and personal accounts all help us to build up a factual picture of the lives of Titanic’s passengers and crew, and at this distance from the event, when all the survivors (and of course the victim) have died many years ago, as has anyone that might have a personal memory of any of the victims, perhaps clarifying the facts that is the best we can hope for. But this book raises the tantalising possibility that there exist largely untapped resource containing tangible clues to their personalities, through signatures, and handwriting even when the subject of the text might be entirely unrelated to the disaster. Pseudoscientific methods, in this case, graphology, but others such as like phrenology, palm reading, and even more mainstream techniques like psycho-analysis, certainly have their detractors, but they offer insights into the otherwise largely unknowable emotional and intellectual life of the subject. Though whether the conclusions drawn are reliable or accurate is impossible to know. O’Hara who died in 2024, was a journalist and writer. In this book, published in 1989, she is at pains to try demonstrate the effectiveness of graphology in correctly interpreting the personality traits of the subject by testing her skills on living people and asking them to rate the results.