would have expected his book to stir up comment; so, if I may, a few minor observations of my own. In my case, they have to do with editorial issues, except for the garish cover, which clashes with Léo’s manifest seriousness and stated tastes: Varian Fry was not just forthright and successful, he was such despite the direct opposition of the U.S. Department of State, which at the time was unofficially but uniformly anti-Semitic and officially supportive of the Vichy regime — indeed, one would be accurate in saying that State collaborated with Pétain and Vichy. It was not all just this way, to be sure. Individual Foreign Service officers assisted Fry at the risk of their careers, just as, at sea, the U.S. Navy actively cooperated with the Forces Françaises Navales Libres (Free French Naval Forces) before Pearl Harbor, in direct disobedience of official policy. Still, policy was policy. Fry, who ended his life uncelebrated, suffering from alcoholism and making a poor living teaching Greek and Latin to young boys at a New England prep school, had been more than heroic, rescuing upwards of 2,000 persons, until State had Vichy throw him out of France. That (O.S.) or [O.S.] attached to citations of the first thirteen issues of the Journal, from 1946 to 1949, stands for Original Series, not Old Series. The Baring-Gould “edition” of his Annotated Sherlock Holmes is an offset-printed paste-up of various London: John Murray publications, and the texts reflect British usage as a result of this. Of course, I agree with the editors that Sauvage primarily used the Doubleday edition, with its errors and Americanisms, occasionally turning to the Baring-Gould Annotated for commentary. (The Doubleday was pretty much the only thing most of us had during Sauvage’s lifetime.) But I need to be brief; and you also. Get Sherlockian Heresies. Read it. It will get your own dialectical juices flowing. George Fletcher is “The Cardboard Box,” BSI, and claims to have retired as director of Special Collections at the New York Public Library. Previously Astor Curator of Printed Books and Bindings at the Pierpont Morgan Library, before that he was the director of Fordham University Press, where he published the Baker Street Journal for some happy years. Posted October 4, 2010: SHERLOCK HOLMES, CONAN DOYLE & THE BOOKMAN Pastiches, Parodies, Letters, Columns and Commentary from America’s “Magazine of Literature and Life” ( 1895-1933) Edited and Annotated by S. E. Dahlinger and Leslie S. Klinger Indianapolis: Gasogene Books, 2010. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-938501-503 $29.95 In this, the first decade of the 21st century, anyone who can connect to the worldwide web can be deluged — and paralyzed — by a flood of virtual news, information, misinformation, blogs, opinions, images etc., on nearly any conceivable topic. A hundred years ago, a principal delivery system for those kinds of material was the monthly magazine. One such magazine, The Bookman, appeared with different content on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Both the Senior Editor, Harry Thurston Peck, and the Junior Editor, Arthur Bartlett Maurice, of the American Bookman were obsessed with the doings of Sherlock Holmes. In fact, Peck claimed to be “the only true Sherlockian”; whereas, the annotators of this collection allege (p. 85) that Maurice provided “the first use of the term ‘Sherlockian’ to mean a student of Sherlock Holmes.” The result of the mania shared by Peck and Maurice was a devotion to tracking and commenting upon various strands of Sherlockiana, Doyleana, and numerous other detective appearances coeval to their publication. In fact, they published works by writers such as S. S. Van Dine, Carolyn Wells, Robert Barr, Valentine Williams, Vincent Starrett, etc. Not that I would not love to leisurely flip through all of the four decades of The Bookman, but the essence of this volume is that Dahlinger and Klinger have already extracted the full contributions, and reorganized them chronologically and by genre (Chronicle and Comment, Letters to the Editor, Articles, Pastiches and Parodies, and Reviews), giving a contemporary flow to each section. This is an excellent route to appreciating the growth and development of Sherlockian appreciation essentially from the beginning. It also places Doyle in the context of his contemporaries like R.L.S., J. M. Barrie, Jack London, Harding Davis, Anna Katherine Green, as well as his predecessors in Poe, Gaboriau, and Vidocq. A lot of this material is familiar to in-depth students of the subject, but it is a quick, rewarding refresher course in the subject matter, with learned annotations, but with occasional nuggets that pop to the surface. For example, the effort to solve HOUN based upon only the first two or three installments: e.g., a human/animal hybrid. (Note: these ingenious solutions were later read by Conan Doyle, “who intimated that they were worthy of Lestrade or Gregson.”) Another nugget of literary gossip is that Ian McLaren is the nom de plume of Rev. John Watson: a nugget attributed to the professional Scotsman Robertson Nicoll who asked "Did ye ken that Thackeray was a verra immorral mon?” Why, the “Editorial Adventure Story” by Trumbull White, in which he narrates his long quest to acquire a yet-to-be written manuscript co-authored by Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung, is almost worth the $29.95 purchase price itself. Hornung, of course, was Doyle's brother-in-law, and that ms. would have described the definitive encounter of Holmes and Raffles. The nugget within the nugget is that Doyle refused to be engaged upon the project despite an essentially guaranteed advance payment of half a million dollars! (Herewith a personal digression. In an article on “The Art of Parody” (pp. 25-26), one of the editors opines that: Bret Harte’s first volume of Condensed Novels was entirely admirable, not quite so much may be said for the second. Some of the old dash and fire is missing. Yet, on the whole, most of the parodies are excellent. As poor as any is “The Stolen Cigar Case,” in which Sherlock Holmes as Hemlock Jones deduces a condition of affairs which puts an end to his long association with Watson. But Sherlock Holmes has never been successfully parodied. As an antiquarian bookseller, I cannot but be painfully reminded of an incident nearly forty years ago. For a period, Mr. Bret Harte represented the United States in the role of Consul to a couple of European cities. Then he settled permanently in London. One night, after a night of partying, Harte returned home to discover that he had lost his cigarette case. The next day he wrote to his host to request its return. About 1972, my mentor, Mr. Van Allen Bradley (author of Gold in Your Attic), offered to sell me that original autograph letter. Sadly I could not afford the approximately $150 he asked for it, and it went to someone else. At that time I knew of Harte as a California friend of Mark Twain. If I had only known that that incident may have provoked Harte’s Sherlockian parody, I certainly would have found a way to acquire that epistle.) Meanwhile, other not-to-be-missed nuggets in this compilation include a very late (1927) article by Conan Doyle which relates to his interest in Spiritualism. (Did you know he opened a Spiritualism Bookshop near the British Museum?) Called “The Alleged Posthumous Writings of Known Authors,” it in part attempts to resolve The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which remained unfinished at Dickens' death. Last, but certainly not least, this reprints various contributions by Vincent Starrett in advance of his immediate classic The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. They demonstrate the state of mind of a youngish Starrett trying to work from his reporter’s notebooks, showing his growth toward writing his biography. However, at p. 179, Starrett relates an anecdote at the Cliff Dwellers’ Club in Chicago which involved Arnold Bennett and Karl Edwin Harriman. I would swear that elsewhere (in Born in a Bookshop?) the same anecdote is told involving Opie Read and Vincent Starrett. (Note: in more than 35 years of selling rare books in Chicago, I have never seen any which support either version of this anecdote.) Also, there are some fresh twists on the use of a Ouija board in the press room of the Chicago Daily News. I enjoyed this book. I recommend it. The annotations prevent a lot of Googling. That which is old is new again in this new presentation. Steve Doyle and his Gasogene Press colleagues are to be applauded for producing this project. Thomas J. Joyce Thomas J. Joyce (“The Yellow-backed Novel,” BSI) is a rare books dealer, and a long-time member of Chicago’s bibliophile society, The Caxton Club. Return to the Welcome page. Posted August 21, 2010: Sherlock Alive: Sherlockian Excerpts from Vincent Starrett’s “Books Alive” Column in The Chicago Tribune 1942 – 1967. Compiled and Annotated by Karen Murdock, with an Introduction by Susan Rice. Eugenia, ONT: The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2010. 503pp., illus., bibliography, index, paper covers. $35.00 ISBN 978-1-55246-908-8 It is difficult to imagine the state of Sherlockian studies or the history of the Baker Street Irregulars without thinking of Vincent Starrett. Novelist, short story writer, poet, critic, columnist, bookman, he was the voice of literary Chicago in the middle of the twentieth century. He not only wrote one of the best biographies of Sherlock Holmes in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933), but kept green the memory of the Master in his weekly “Books Alive” column for the Chicago Tribune. Not every column mentioned Sherlock Holmes, but just as King Charles’ head kept popping up in the manuscript Mr. Dick was writing in David Copperfield, the name of Sherlock Holmes would surface in Starrett’s columns without warning. Vincent Starrett saw the world from the point of view of Baker Street. This collection begins with his earliest columns in the Chicago Daily News and continues when it moved to the Chicago Tribune. The first is dated September 2, 1942, the last August 13, 1967. (His final “Books Alive” column was September 3, 1967, but did not deal with Sherlock Holmes.) Only those portions of the columns relating to Sherlock Holmes are reprinted, though occasionally an entire column will appear if the context demands it. Interestingly, the very first discusses the manuscript of “The Case of the Man Who Was Wanted,” suspected at that time to be an actual undiscovered Sherlock Holmes story written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The last column completely devoted to Sherlock Holmes is a review of Pierre Nordon’s Conan Doyle: A Biography. The book is necessarily episodic, but nevertheless i contributions, first in the years I helped Julian Wolff at Julian’s dining-room table and later as the Nude osearchr 1stlivenude a Www ’s publisher, I really knew Léo through Julian. They were clearly kinsprits. Léo derived the title of this book from one of Julian’s editorial observations, “Long live heresy!” He captures Julian in a nutshell: “The surgical precision of Wolff’s repartees has rarely been topped, even by Isaac Asimov’s flying saucers” (p. 231). As I have written elsewhere, Julian was the master of the one-liner, and the consummate detector of humbug and pretense.


    The manuscript of Sherlockian Heresies survived for many years as part of the paternal archive saved by the three Sauvage children, and a happy accident brought them into contact with the editors. Mesdames McKuras and Vizoskie are to be congratulated heartedly for their excellent work of investigation, reconstruction, editing, and annotating. Their Introduction is first-rate, and the endnotes to each chapter extremely thorough. They have brought this book close to the form its author would have achieved had he been vouchsafed the time to do so.  Moreover, working with the Sauvage family and an acknowledged battery of human and archival resources, they have brought Léo Sauvage back from obscurity, and revealed who he really was. It’s a long story, so suffice it to say that the Franco-American journalist known to Sherlockians began life as a Jewish German. He grew up in France, married a Jewish Pole, and both of them eventually made themselves over into the French New Yorkers we knew. Not religiously observant (not, of course, that that would have saved them), they survived the Holocaust thanks to the heroic and righteous Huguenots of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Before that, as refugees in Marseille, they had not made it to the front of the line of those saved by the redoubtable Varian Fry before Fry was deported, about which more later.


    Léo Sauvage’s shepherd into the Irregulars was no one less than Edgar W. Smith. Given an assignment some six decades ago on postwar American exports to Europe, Sauvage interviewed a certain gracious senior official of overseas operations for General Motors at his office on Broadway at 57th Street. The niceties of selling vehicles in Europe took ten minutes; the next two hours were devoted to Sherlock Holmes. Léo became a regular Irregular, as he calls himself (“Victor Savage,” 1960), at the annual dinners for nearly forty years and as a contributor to the Journal.


    He began to read the stories as the age of eleven (ca. 1924), and thus was one of that vanished breed able to read certain of the adventures as they were published. He rightly describes the formidable Jacques Barzun, his fellow Frenchman, as “One of the intellectually most impressive Sherlockians I have met.” He repeats approvingly Professor Barzun’s round condemnation of “those intolerable middle sections which potbelly” Sign, Study, and Valley, saying further that “The astute reader reads them once, at the age of twelve, and skips them forever after.” Sauvage observes that, “Astute or not, that’s what I did from the age of eleven” (pp. 53–54).


    Sauvage’s critical strictures in Sherlockian Heresies are not nitpickings; this is not a chapter of faults, so to speak. The only area approaching this minor art form is his distaste for those aspects of American punctuation that put terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks; then again, the editors did not permit this to survive their work, so the minor issue is moot in this publication. No, he saves his heavy guns for substantive issues, and recurs to numbers of them throughout the chapters:


• Personally a secularist, he is particularly adamant that there is nothing sacred about the writings: there can thus be no Sacred Writings and thereby no Canon. What he consistently demands is that it be the Conan, and he writes often and strongly of Conanicity and the like.


• He deplores the lack of security in the Holmes–Watson flat, and details many instances of life-threatening dangers and serious threats to confidentiality, solely the product of unlocked doors, unlimited access to total strangers, and failures to observe the simplest acts of watchfulness.


• He evaluates various attempts to identify the “best” and the “least” of the stories, sparing no one, taking issue even with such generally lauded works as “The Speckled Band.”


• He makes it abundantly clear that 221B is the address of a whole structure, and not some misguided interpretation of the B as designating the first- (American second-) floor quarters. For that matter, he is doubtful that the actual residence was even on Baker Street, let alone its putative location on that street, whether the bifurcated thoroughfare of the Victorian era or the long single stretch of the decades since.


• He finds the offered “facts” of “The Final Problem” and “The Empty House” completely risible.


There is much more to challenge the engaged reader’s beliefs and assumptions, and he takes serious issue with the findings of even the greatest among us in the past.


    Léo Sauvage would have expected his book to stir up comment; so, if I may, a few minor observations of my own. In my case, they have to do with editorial issues, except for the garish cover, which clashes with Léo’s manifest seriousness and stated tastes:


    Varian Fry was not just forthright and successful, he was such despite the direct opposition of the U.S. Department of State, which at the time was unofficially but uniformly anti-Semitic and officially supportive of the Vichy regime — indeed, one would be accurate in saying that State collaborated with Pétain and Vichy. It was not all just this way, to be sure. Individual Foreign Service officers assisted Fry at the risk of their careers, just as, at sea, the U.S. Navy actively cooperated with the Forces Françaises Navales Libres (Free French Naval Forces) before Pearl Harbor, in direct disobedience of official policy. Still, policy was policy. Fry, who ended his life uncelebrated, suffering from alcoholism and making a poor living teaching Greek and Latin to young boys at a New England prep school, had been more than heroic, rescuing upwards of 2,000 persons, until State had Vichy throw him out of France.


    That (O.S.) or [O.S.] attached to citations of the first thirteen issues of the Journal, from 1946 to 1949, stands for Original Series, not Old Series.


    The Baring-Gould “edition” of his Annotated Sherlock Holmes is an offset-printed paste-up of various London: John Murray publications, and the texts reflect British usage as a result of this. Of course, I agree with the editors that Sauvage primarily used the Doubleday edition, with its errors and Americanisms, occasionally turning to the Baring-Gould Annotated for commentary. (The Doubleday was pretty much the only thing most of us had during Sauvage’s lifetime.)


    But I need to be brief; and you also. Get Sherlockian Heresies. Read it. It will get your own dialectical juices flowing.


George Fletcher is “The Cardboard Box,” BSI, and claims to have retired as director of Special Collections at the New York Public Library. Previously Astor Curator of Printed Books and Bindings at the Pierpont Morgan Library, before that he was the director of Fordham University Press, where he published the Baker Street Journal for some happy years.





Posted October 4, 2010:


SHERLOCK HOLMES, CONAN DOYLE & THE BOOKMAN

Pastiches, Parodies, Letters, Columns and Commentary from

America’s “Magazine of Literature and Life” ( 1895-1933)

Edited and Annotated by S. E. Dahlinger and Leslie S. Klinger


Indianapolis: Gasogene Books, 2010. 272 pp.

ISBN 978-0-938501-503     $29.95


In this, the first decade of the 21st century, anyone who can connect to the worldwide web can be deluged — and paralyzed — by a flood of virtual news, information, misinformation, blogs, opinions, images etc., on nearly any conceivable topic. A hundred years ago, a principal delivery system for those kinds of material was the monthly magazine. One such magazine, The Bookman, appeared with different content on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.


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