Autumn 2024 BSJ

The Autumn 2024 Baker Street Journal includes these articles:

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp.

A Connecticut Yankee and Conan Doyle’s Canon
by S. E. Dahlinger.

Something Smells: The Dressing Gown Business Again
by Bruce Harris.

Shaving Sherlock: Charles A. Doyle’s Illustrations for A Study in Scarlet
by Laurence Pernet.

Secrets of “The Naval Treaty”
by Thomas Cynkin.

Unravelling the Scarlet Thread: A Study in A Study in Scarlet and The Scarlet Letter
by Daniel Friedman and Eugene Friedman.

Freemasonry Among Horsey Men
by S. Brent Morris.

Phosphorus and the Making of a Hellhound
by Matthew D. Hall.

The Annotated Conan Doyle in French
by Vincent Delay.

The Mazarin Stone: What Was the Crown Diamond?
by Stefano Guerra.

The Commonplace Book.

Baker Street Inventory.

Letters to Baker Street.

“Stand with me here upon the terrace…”

Whodunit?

Subscribe to the BSJ today!

* * *

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp

“I trust that you don’t consider your collection closed.”
by Dan Andriacco, Editor

Dan Andriacco, Editor, The Baker Street Journal

A private library and a private collection are two different things. What I have is a library, a fair number of books assembled for reading and reference without regard to publication history. But I am grateful for collectors. Without the demand and therefore value created by them, much precious Sherlockian material might well have been lost.

Randall Stock’s invaluable bestofsherlock.com website notes that existing Holmes manuscripts include almost all of the ones written after 1902, when Arthur Conan Doyle began sending typed copies to his publishers and retaining the originals. And why did he do that? In 1913 he wrote to an unidentified recipient that he was getting his manuscripts bound “so as to be ready for the capricious millionaire whom we all hope for and never see.” In other words, collectors. About half of all the existing manuscripts are in the hands of private collectors today, and many of those held by libraries and museums passed through collectors first.

This summer brought us “Sherlock Holmes@50: Celebrating the Golden Anniversary of the Sherlock Holmes Collections,” a conference which made the University of Minnesota’s Elmer L. Anderson Library the center of the Sherlockian universe for four days. The Collections brought together several formerly private collections of books and other material—including that of the iconic John Bennett Shaw, which was dedicated by the University in the autumn of 1995. The Sherlock Holmes Collections now includes more than 60,000 items.

Another prodigious collector, Richard Lancelyn Green, bequeathed what is now the Conan Doyle Collection of 40,000 items to the city of Portsmouth, where Conan Doyle lived when he wrote A Study in Scarlet. The Arthur Conan Doyle Room at the Toronto Reference Library got its start in 1969 with the purchase of over 150 rare books from the estate of Toronto collector Arthur Baillie. These once-private collections are no longer private, to our benefit.

There are great collectors among us today. You know who they are. And I thank them all.

The Editor’s Gas-Lamp, Autumn 2024, Vol. 74, No. 3.