What Books Were People Reading on the Titanic?

That's the question recently posed on Book Riot.

From the post...

It’s hard to determine exactly what books were on board the Titanic during that ill-fated cruise, but Walter Lord tells us in his classic A Night to Remember that at the time the luxury liner struck the iceberg, Spencer V. Silverthorne sat in a leather armchair in the First Class smoking room on A Deck and “browsed through a new best-seller, The Virginian.” So, if things got really desperate for Mr. Silverthorne, he could have used Owen Wister’s now-classic western to help him keep his head above the waves. And, while Kate and Leo were doing a steamy tango in the back seat of an Edsel, we know that passenger “Lawrence Beesley stuffed the pockets of his Norfolk jacket with the books he had been reading in bed.” Smart man! Unless those books were Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh or Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, in which case he would have been dragged straight down to the bottom.

I turned to the bestseller lists of the early 1900s to determine which books were filled with the most hot air (inflatable! life-saving!) and which were heavy-laden with turgid prose (sink like a stone).