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