The Spitsbergen Airship Museum

I had been scouring the web, looking for some illustrations of the airship Italia I wanted to potentially reference for my work on the final chapter of my forthcoming graphic novel, Midnight Sun, when I stumbled on the website for the Spitsbergen Airship Museum. It looks like, at this point, the museum is in-progress and expected to open in 2008. In the meantime, though, they appear to have acquired some pretty amazing airship-related items, including a ton of Italia stuff. Here are a few of the illustrations I had been seeking out; apparently the museum has copies of the original newspapers in its collection:

It’s interesting to note that, although there were only a small handful of books written in English about the Italia disaster, that apparently–judging by the museum’s collection–pretty much everyone involved in the crash itself and/or the subsequent rescue attempts seems to have written a book in his native tongue. The the post-sensational event “book deal” is a phenomenon neither new, nor uniquely American.