The Winter 2020 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.
Two Maids A-Missing
by William Hyder.
The Sherlockian Summer of Roy Atwell
by Sonia Fetherston.
The Medals of the British Wars in Afghanistan and India: Which Medals Did Watson and Others Receive?
by David L. Leal.
What Conan Doyle May Have Learned from Jane Austen
by Michael J. Crowe.
The Mysterious Mycroft Holmes
by Leslie S. Klinger.
“Born to play Sherlock Holmes”: H. A. Saintsbury
by Paul Singleton.
The Commonplace Book.
Baker Street Inventory.
“Stand with me here upon the terrace . . .”
Index to Volume 70
Whodunit?
* * *
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp
“Must come a time, seventy”
by Steven Rothman, Editor

With this issue, the “New Series” of the Baker Street Journal completes 70 volumes. Indeed, the Journal turns 75 in 2021 (not counting those pesky almost two years in 1949 and ’50 without an issue). The BSJ has inspired countless other periodicals devoted to Sherlock Holmes, including most notably the Sherlock Holmes Journal, which began in 1952.
In keeping with its Janus-like dedication to looking backwards towards the years of Holmes’s professional activity while heading clear-eyed into the future, the Journal has always referred to its original incarnation, published by Ben Abramson, as the “Old Series” and its revival as the “New Series.” Logic might dictate that the need for a New Series ended once we passed Volume 4. (The Old Series was 13 numbers in four volumes.) However, it continued to be used through 49 volumes, until finally dropped with Volume 50.
The Journal’s is a proud legacy of scholarship and entertainment. The contributors have proven over and over that the Canon provides endless inspiration for new realms (and reams) of scholarship. The subscribers—often but not always the same as the contributors—demonstrate the voracious appetite for that scholarship.
This puts the Journal in a very fortuitous position. Few publications are so synced with their readership. We all are in this together, for 75 years creating and reading a virtual (in the old-fashioned sense) Baker Street. May Sherlock Holmes continue to be our beacon in these dark times
The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Winter 2020, Vol. 70, No. 4.
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