The Past in Print

You can see Hollywood’s version of the “Titanic” in the theater, but you have to visit a Santa Barbara museum for a fascinating footnote about the “unsinkable” luxury liner.

Hours before the Titanic sped out of port for New York in 1912, a British official penned a document certifying that the ship was “seaworthy, in safe trim, and all respects fit for her intended voyage.”

That fateful document is behind glass--along with some other Titanic-related papers--at Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, where you can also peruse rare historical documents linked to the movie, “Amistad.”

David and Marsha Karpeles, who live in Montecito, are hooked on documents--especially handwritten papers of historical significance. Their astounding collection includes such treasures as the original proposed draft of the U.S. Bill of Rights, a papal declaration from 1183 commencing the Holy Crusades and the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Abraham Lincoln.

The Karpeles have amassed so many of these gems--more than 1 million--that they now have museums not only in Santa Barbara, but in six other spots throughout the U.S., including their stately library in Montecito. Their collections rotate among the museums, which are open to the public free of charge.

It’s a passion with more than a few heart-stopping moments. Last week, Karpeles was in a bidding war with other collectors over the Titanic’s frantic telegraph wire indicating the ship had hit an iceberg.

“I was blown away,” said Karpeles, who had offered $12,000. After five minutes of bidding via conference call, the movie-hyped treasure went for $105,000.

But all was not lost that week. From the widow of a portrait painter, Karpeles bought the original laboratory dish in which Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. Then a dealer at a book convention alerted him to a page from a Gutenberg Bible--the one that spells out how to celebrate Passover.

“It didn’t make a difference what the price was--we were going to get it,” Karpeles said.

But he wouldn’t disclose the cost. “People are fascinated with the prices, but it takes away from the value,” he said.

Still, he and his wife, who have financed their collection by gradually selling off their real estate holdings, seem to have an uncanny knack of sensing which documents will grow in value. They picked up their Titanic papers (including an eyewitness account from the captain of the rescue ship, the Carpathia) after spotting them in an auction catalog several years ago.

“It was not a big deal,” Karpeles said. “They weren’t more than a few thousand apiece. Now they’ve taken on a whole new life.”

He said it’s the same with another purchase: a document from the Eisenhower administration giving nuclear energy to Iraq for peaceful purposes.

“I’ve had it quite some time,” he said. “Whatever is exciting in the news, we’ll have something [about it] by the end of the week.”

The computer used in Apollo’s historic 1969 moon landing is on display at the museum. In another case sits a note scrawled in pencil by religious mystic Rasputin. He writes of the tears he is shedding for someone dear, possibly the hemophiliac son of Czar Nicholas and Alexandra, according to Norman Cohan, director of the Santa Barbara museum.

Like the writing of a young child, Cohan said, it’s rife with spelling and grammatical errors, indicating that the power-hungry cleric may have been barely literate.

Elsewhere, visitors can see sheet music penned by Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, to name a few.

The Karpeles don’t collect simply to collect. They exult over the thrill of seeing a piece of paper actually handled by King Henry VIII, or imagining what was going through Darwin’s mind when he jotted something down.

Married 40 years and the parents of four, neither is a lifelong historian. “We only got started because of the children,” said Marsha Karpeles. As parents, they were frustrated with the education their children and others were getting in the 1970s. The kids didn’t seem to know the things that previous generations had learned in school--and they didn’t care.

A family trip to the Huntington Library near Pasadena changed that. As they looked at some historic documents, their daughter was amazed to see that her handwriting resembled that of Thomas Jefferson. Their son was intrigued by the words crossed out. The parents were astonished that many significant documents--like the pass given to Lincoln’s bodyguard the night he was shot--were owned not by archives or museums but by private collectors.

They studied catalogs of rare manuscripts and made their first purchase, a manuscript of the 1894 British novel, “A Prisoner of Zenda,” in 1978. Now their agents handle most of their purchases.

Their real estate investments--mostly single-family homes in the Santa Barbara area that once numbered in the hundreds--have dwindled considerably.

“We’re getting out of real estate,” David Karpeles said. “We’ve sold most everything. We’re tired of doing two things at once.”

BE THERE

Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, 21 W. Anapamu St., Santa Barbara, is open daily, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free. For information, call 962-5322.