Barbara Cartland, at home with flowers

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland poses for a rather formal photo in her country home, Camfield Place, in 1994. This was six years before her death at age 98 in 2000. CBS News estimated that she had sold an astonishing *two billion* books in her lifetime; her obituary in The New York Times said that Cartland "was able to turn out 50,000-word novels at the rate of two a month. During the 1980's, when she was hardly young, she routinely produced 23 titles a year." Which is how you get a country estate, a lavish gown and jewelry, and all the flowers you care to have strewn around you for a magnificent photo like this. All the money in the world apparently *can't* buy a hearty dog that could make its own way in the world, but then, one can't have everything.