One
of the scenes in the popular TV programme 'Sex in New York City' showed
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) read to Big (Christ North)
fragments of love letters, extracts of a book, 'Love Letters Of Great
Men', to demonstrate that great men in the history (Napoleon, Beethoven,
Lord Byron ...) were capable of expressing their love sentiments
without reserve or shame.
Immediately after the showing of that episode, the book-stores received thousands of orders for this book ... which didn't exist. The web-sites of publishers and searchers too were inundated with requests to help find it. There were a few books with more or less the same title, but people wanted 'that one', the same one appeared in the film, a small detail that editors didn't know how to play with, one they did have catalogued, the work collected in 1920 by C.H. Charles, titled: ' Love letters of great men and women - from the 18th century to the present day'.
In the history of literature, there had been a lot of imaginary books - neither Borges nor Lovecraft were the first to play with fictitious books - but this might be the first case where a fictional character was the editor of a book in which appeared letters that the film had referred to, written by great men, but not precisely great letters.
Why the very modern lady in the film cited love letters anyway? Even in 1920, C.H.Charles said that the youngsters of new motos, chewing gum and cinema, were too busy to write love letters (in 1920? I thought young people in that era lived to write them!). And somebody else said: "Love is no more than a game of fancy and vanity" Beethoven took it very seriously though. In his letter to his beloved, Antoine Brentano (?), he ended the letter writing:
'Eternally yours, Eternally mine, Eternally ours.'
Hollywood being Hollywood, I wouldn't be at all surprised that they have already had the thinking cap on and seeing the cash-machine turning, commissioning some screen writer to turn out such a volume of love letters, allegedly written by some great men. Not often there's millions of readers waiting to buy a book not yet written. After all, business is business.
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