Summer 2021 BSJ

The Summer 2021 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

Charles Thomas Marvin, the Foreign Office, and the Naval Treaty
by Mark Jones.

The Rise of Mycroft Holmes
by Thomas Cynkin.

Sherlock in Simla
by Fred Lerner.

That Coventry Factory
by Mark Alberstat.

The Empty Bookshelf; or, the Missing Three Quartos: Reasonable Editions at a Comfortable Price
by Robert D. Madison.

“A little chocolate and silver volume”
by Daniel P. King.

Between Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side: The Early Stages of Sherlock Holmes in Yiddish
by Reuven Gafni.

Cross Words for the BSI Crossword Puzzle
by Bruce Harris.

The Commonplace Book.

Baker Street Inventory.

Letters to Baker Street.

Whodunit?

Cover Illustration by Lisa Lygo.

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The Editor’s Gas-Lamp

“Her nose stuck in a book”
by Steven Rothman, Editor

Steven Rothman, Editor, The Baker Street Journal

Just as much as the Canon itself, books are one of the glues that keep Sherlockians together. If your house is even slightly like ours, it is stuffed with books—on shelves, tables, floors, all in the process of being read, waiting to be re-shelved, or just briefly consulted. Packages of them come with alarming rapidity, threatening to bury us in an avalanche of print.

Visiting Sherlockians feel at home as they gaze at so many familiar titles on the shelves of their host. This addiction to books is in the DNA of the Irregulars. Christopher Morley, Vincent Starrett, Edgar Smith, Julian Wolff, and many others were all avid readers, writers, and book collectors.

Conan Doyle, too, loved books. His most personal book, Through the Magic Door, describes the favorites in his own library. In his volumes of travels while proselytizing for Spiritualism, he more than once described the delights he discovered in the libraries of his hosts.

And we know Holmes loved his books. Not just the rat’s nest of newspapers and magazines that Watson has made our major impression of the Baker Street sitting-room, but the armful of books he carted about in “The Empty House” when, disguised as a “strange old book-collector,” he announces himself to Watson. By the time of his retirement in “The Lion’s Mane,” Holmes has a great garret stuffed with books. Yes, he is one of us.

Fortunately, we live in the best of times for Sherlockian books of genuine quality to fill that gap on the second shelf.

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Summer 2021, Vol. 71, No. 2.