Mea Culpa

I am not as conscientious about this blog as I should be, for which I apologize.  But since the holidays ended I have resumed the new Links of the Week at my BSI Archival History website, and added a bunch of stuff elsewhere there, including highlights of my own from the BSI weekend in New York, that are best accessed through the website's Editor's Gas-Bag at http://www.bsiarchivalhistory.org/BSI_Archival_History/Gas-Bag.html.  


Woody Hazelbaker's World will take a while longer to resume.  Working against a deadline, Dan Stashower and I are annotating the text of A. Conan Doyle's first, never published, attempt at a novel, and writing a critical introduction for it.  The book will be published by the British Library in the autumn.  The Narrative of John Smith (which in his 1924 autobiography Memories and Adventures Conan Doyle described not entirely honestly as having been lost forever in the post in 1883) is not the sort of work one usually thinks of as a Conan Doyle novel.  But it is proving to be a source of considerable discoveries about his reading, thinking, and future literary trajectory at the time when he was a struggling young physician in Southsea, struggling even hard to become a published writer.  Reading the ms., it can be difficult to believe that in just a year -- he was rewriting it from memory in 1884 -- he would create Sherlock Holmes and write A Study in Scarlet.  But many elements of that first Sherlock Holmes tale asee light first in this earlier manuscript of his, not to mention of his subsequent Holmes tales and other literary work of his.