Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Keeping A Promise

The BSI Archival History website continues to be updated, the latest being a new discovery by Mike Dirda at the Ask Thucydides dept., and a link to a lovely tribute to the late Ronald Mansbridge, one of my all-time favorite Irregulars, at the Editor's Gas-Bag.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012


BAKER STREET IRREGULAR
A nice comment about the novel by mystery writer and Sherlockian Dan Andriacco at his blog recently, greatly appreciated by me:

I'd have posted Mr. Andriacco’s kind comments sooner, but only returned last night from several magnificent weeks in Yorkshire and Scotland.  I will post a few words about the Doylean aspects of the trip, especially my visit to Peterhead, from which Conan Doyle sailed on the Arctic whaler Hope in February 1880, in a couple of days here.

Friday, July 20, 2012


MY APOLOGIES for the lengthy time my BSI Archival History website sat on a virtual shelf. In the autumn of 2010, Dan Stashower and I agreed to co-edit the first of two new books about A. Conan Doyle for the British Library, and keeping my website active fell victim to this among other things. The first book was an annotated transcript of Conan Doyle’s first attempt at a novel in 1883, The Narrative of John Smith; it came out last October. The second, “Dangerous Work”: Diary of an Arctic Adventure, will be published in September. It’s a facsimile with an annotated transcript of the hand-written and –illustrated diary Conan Doyle kept as ship’s surgeon on the Arctic whaler Hope in 1880. It has not been read by others for over fifty years, and concludes with a direct link to the first Sherlock Holmes tale. 

So much for A. Conan Doyle for a while, and back to BSI history. You will find at the website -- http://www.bsiarchivalhistory.org -- my “Ronald Knox Myth” essay for the Sherlock Holmes Journal (plus another blow to the myth in the Disputations department), two additional essays, a Q&A at Ask Thucydides, new Links of the Week, and more. I shall endeavor to keep the website up to date from now on — or anyway, after returning from a few weeks’ vacation in Yorkshire and Scotland.
                                                                                                    Rodger Prescott of evil memory