The Official Beatrice Letters DISCUSSION thread

[Gigi]

WARNING: THIS THREAD WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS. It is advised that you don't read this thread if you do not have TBL yet and do not want to be spoiled.

The time has come for the Official Beatrice Letters discussion thread to be released. This thread is for discussion of The Beatrice Letters. Remember, this is the ONLY place that Beatrice Letters discussion should take place for the time being.

Please refer to the Official Spoiler Rules Thread. If you haven't read it already, please do so now.

[Gigi]

Okay, I'll get the ball rolling with a general description of The Beatrice Letters.

The book package contains the red hard cover, which when you open it, it reveals top file folder type pockets, both labelled "Letters". The first pocket holds the double sided poster. One side is the scene from a cave. The other is the shipwreck scene.

The second pocket contains the actual bound letters of correspondence. The letters are alternately from Beatrice to Lemony Snicket and then from Lemony to Beatrice.

The letters Beatrice writes appear to be written from a young girl. She addresses Lemony as Sir and is asking him for help finding her only remaining family, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire. Successive letters from Beatrice follow her pursuit of Lemony as he goes to his office to find him since he does not answer her letters. He seems to be gone on his investigations of the Baudelaire orphans.

The letters that Lemony writes to Beatrice start when they are both children in school. Beatrice is 10 and Lemony 11 years old. They clearly are love letters. These letters progress as the years pass. Lemony writes for the paper and Beatrice is an actress. But then he asks her to marry him. She refuses and the letters stop. Years later, he sends a telegram when Beatrice is married and expecting a child.

The punch out letters are interspersed with the correspondence. They are on pages that match the two-sided poster. These same letters can be found in the letters of correspondence and on three photographs that are included. A Lachrymose leech that forms an S, a hatpin which resembles an I and a curl of hair that is a C.

The letters are: E E N S I K R A C T A B Unscramble them and it spells out BEATRICE SANK.

The dates on the letters are unusual. Some are simple, like "Wednesday", which doesn't mean anything. Other are unique and probably have some meaning to them.

Year of the Snake (Chinese calendar) 1917, 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001

February 28 – Daniel Hander’s birthday

Scribian’s Anniversary - ? Famous Russian composer (1872-1915)

Victoria Day Eve – the Monday on or before May 24

Midway through Days of Awe – (Jewish calendar) the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur



So, what should we discuss first?

[dimkasmir]

Wait. What do you mean there are two pockets? Where are the pockets located?

[Gigi]

Picture it like this: When you open the red cover, the inside of the front is empty. Attached to the inside back cover are two accordion-fold type folders, like files. The openings are by the hinge of the cover. That way, when everything is in place and you put the elastic around the outside, nothing will fall out.

[dimkasmir]

Oh. So there aren't any actual pages?

[Gigi]

The actual pages are in the plain white book with the simple lettering "The Beatrice Letters" that you've probably seen on bn.com. The letters of correspondence are all bound in that book.


Anyway, I had a revelation this afternoon. I didn't punch out my letters because I didn't want them to get wrecked. But like I said, they are punched out of pictures from the poster, half from one side and half from the other.

I got to thinking about the Book Blast blurb "Punch-out letters should be removed and arranged to reveal at least one important secret message". So I went back and looked at which letters go with which side of the poster. I came up with this:

bat side: E I C R N A
shipwreck side: K E T A B S

Maybe those letters also make an anagram besides BEATRICE SANK. By rearranging each set of letters seperately, I came up with A NICER BASKET. Now, I don't know if that is what they meant, or if that is right arrangement or if it is right, what does it mean?

[TheManager]

So where is the poster located at?

[Gigi]

In the other pocket.

Funny thing about the poster. Since it has two sides, I was planning on hanging it in my classroom window that faces the hallway. Then we could see both sides at once. But the bat side is printed vertically and the shipwreck side is printed horizontally. So if I hang it up, one side will be right and one side will be sideways,

[s]

Gah, they really are being most unhelpful with that poster. I shan't be able to decide on which side to hang up.

[Zavi]

I've checked the threads and I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but this possibly SPOILER image of the cover has an area highlighted that I think looks familiar. Forgive me if it's old news, but I just found it. O.o

[Elephant Baudelaire]

Cool. In todays arthur tracker it mentions that there is a hidden picture in the cover.
I was wondering what it was.

[Libitina]

TBL is quite puzzling. There are so many ways to interpret everything that we probably won't be certain about anything for quite a while.

From what I gathered, Lemony was writing to his love, Beatrice Baudelaire (let's call her Beatrice #1 for the sake of easier explaining), in all of the letters. These letters take place over a number of years, leading up to Beatrice's refusal to marry Lemony. The final telegram takes place years later, apparently,after Beatrice #1 has gotten married and is pregnant. This telegram suggests that Beatrice #1 actually is the Baudelaire mother. However, since we have so much evidence against this and this telegram is more ambiguous than the others, it almost leads one to believe that the letter was written to Beatrice Baudelaire #2. This telegram is addressed to Mrs. Baudelaire, which could mean that all our evidence was wrong and Beatrice is the Baudelaires' mother, and that her maiden name is never referred to--she is always referred to as Beatrice Baudelaire. It could also mean that her maiden name also began with the letter B but was not Baudelaire...Or, perhaps, Beatrice #1 married another Baudelaire (Mr. Baudelaire's brother, perhaps). Mneh, this is incredibly puzzling.

The letters from Beatrice Baudelaire #2 appear to be from a younger girl somehow related to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. She is desperate for Mr. Snicket's help in finding them. Since Lemony has said that Beatrice is the reason he is researching the Baudelaire case, perhaps the Beatrice he is referring to is this young girl, and not the woman he loved.

I'm sorry if little of that made sense. I'm trying to decipher all of it at once and it's not really working. *headdesk*

[Gigi]

No, I think you are right on the mark. Snicketfires and I have been discussing this since Saturday, and those are the same conclusions we came to.

And I think that all ties into the mystery image on the cover. It is showing us the young Beatrice on the left and the grown Beatrice in the main picture.

I think in the end, we'll all agree that there are two Beatrices, one old and one younger. What remians to be seen is how she is related to the Baudelaires. Young Beatrice confesses to be related to the orphans, but doesn't specifially say how. We are inferring from the telgram that older Beatrice is the mother of the orphans, but we can't conclusively say she is.

[Triangle Eyes]

zavi said:

I've checked the threads and I haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but this possibly SPOILER image of the cover has an area highlighted that I think looks familiar. Forgive me if it's old news, but I just found it. O.o

I noticed that too, after the author track e-mail said there was a hidden picture on the cover. That must be it.

[superorange]

I've been thinking, is BB2 BB1s DAUGHTER? That would be quite a twist.

But this book explains the series completely. BB1 was just a woman Lemony loved, and when she died, he went to look through the letters and found something completely different. He then wrote the book series in the hope of helping BB2 find the Baud's. Someone's gonna make an appearence in book thirteeeeeeeeeeen. XD

I love what Handler did with this, the fact that the sent/recieved letters might be completely different never occured to me.

Edit: Upon another flip-through, I noticed something else. Sunny is mentioned "on the radio about her recipes" confirming that SHE also does not die in The End. ALSO, the 170 chapters thing made me think of something. There's an extra chapter in the end of The End, many years after the series, that mentions them meeting up with Beatrice again, which would fit the last word being "Beatrice"

P.S. a 14th chapter would break the unlucky streak . 14 is a multiple of lucky 7.