The Winter 2017 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.
Weaving In and Out of the Game
by Andrew L. Solberg.
A “Most Desirable Residence”
by Leslie S. Klinger.
The Death of Baron Dowson
by Christopher Redmond.
Illustrating the Gothic: “Shoscombe Old Place”
by Candace J. Lewis.
Sherlockian Gothic in Conan Doyle’s Last Bow
by Roger Donway.
Charade in Kent
by Jens Byskov Jensen.
Tapping Around The Hound
by Peter Calamai.
Art in the Blood
by Scott Bond.
The Commonplace Book
Baker Street Inventory
The Sherlockian Societies
Reports from Abroad
“Stand with me here upon the terrace . . .”
Index to Volume 67
Whodunit?
* * *
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp
“A world of pure imagination”
by Steven Rothman, Editor
Most of us have found ourselves being questioned about our Sherlockian pastime. Do we solve crimes or mysteries, we are asked? Do we all wear deerstalkers and smoke calabash pipes? Do we go to movies together? Who is our favorite Sherlock Holmes? And (the classic): Surely we don’t think he was real? Depending on the day, the interlocutor, and the depth of friendship, the answers will vary greatly.
Consider, then, the great difficulty in explaining what is published in the Journal and other Sherlockian publications.
The breadth of subjects covered in our very large tent ranges from cartography to chronology, from railroads to riddles, from film to feminism. That breadth, and the depth of our researches, is the answer to the non-Sherlockian doubters and mockers. We take the whole of knowledge and apply it to the world of the Canon.
Those who play our Grand Game, those who write for the BSJ and other Sherlockian publications, have the best sort of fun. They seek to create what Holmes described in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”: “[T]hat mixture of imagination and reality which is the basis of . . . art.”
So, answer any doubting Thomas with your head held high. You who play the Game as Dorothy L. Sayers instructed—“as solemnly as a county cricket match at Lord’s”—are not just scholars, you are artists, and artists in the true Sherlockian vein.
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Winter 2017, Vol. 67, No. 4.
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