Darren:
There’s a thread under the Gilded Age topic that addresses some of your questions. As to Helen Churchill Candee’s books, particularly The Tapestry Book, being of value only to Titanic buffs. Her book on wage-earning for women is listed in feminist bibliographies as a landmark study, her works on interior design and textiles are in most decorators’ libraries, and her travelogues on Asia are considered classics in that genre as well. A decorator I know has had a 1912 first edition of The Tapestry Book in her collection for years, never knowing Helen Candee was on Titanic; when I told her, she rolled her eyes and laughed, "Who WASN’T on the Titanic?" So it didn’t make the book more valuable to her. It was —— and is ——valuable to her because of the subject Candee was writing on.
So, it all depends on your perspective. People interested in a field in which a victim or survivor was prominent will likely have heard of them in relation to their work first (i.e., Archie Butt, W.T. Stead, Karl Behr, Lucile, etc), rather than as a passenger on Titanic. But some Titanic enthusiasts tend to view these people in a bubble —— they see their importance ONLY as it relates to Titanic and have very little interest in or respect for their lives apart from the disaster.
By the way, the 1935 re-release of Candee’s Tapestry Book has a nice cover but the original 1912 issue is the better one as far as the quality of the images. Her "Jacobean Furniture" (1916) is also very nice, and fairly relevant, since some of Titanic’s most elegant spaces were decorated in that style.
Randy