By THOMAS J. JOYCE [BSI Archival History] – 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…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…

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.

Continued at BSI Archival History | More Chronicle & Notices.