BSI Archival History
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COMING TO YOU FROM SANTA FE, N.M.
To see what’s new, go to the Editor’s Gas-Bag,
or visit our other BSI Archival History departments:
Reviews Disputations Ask Thucydides!
THE BAKER STREET IRREGULARS:
Founded in New York in 1934 by the writer and critic Christopher Morley and others devoted to A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, for more than seventy-five years the BSI has (to quote its founder) “perpetuated the myth that Sherlock Holmes is not a myth.” Since 1989, the Archival Histories have re-corded the speakeasy origins, eccentric creation, and well-watered activities of the sodality (“even whisky and sodality”) taking its name from the London street urchins who were Holmes’s secret eyes and ears in late-Victorian England. This website examines the seven volumes and shorter works of the series, and more.
The drawing above by Frederic Dorr Steele,
America’s foremost illustrator of the Sherlock Holmes stories working in the first part of the twentieth century, and showing here Holmes extracting documents from his own personal archives at 221b Baker Street, has served as the BSI Archival Histories’ colophon since the inception of the series in 1989. The proud owner of the original is Jerry Margolin (“Hilton Cubitt,” BSI), to whom all thanks.
For more about the BSI Archival Histories, read “History Detective!”
Other Archival History Departments:
The Editor’s Gas-Bag here
My biography of Edgar W. Smith continues with Part 5.
Reviews here
Latest: a review, by me, of a new book about Christopher Morley, founder of The Baker Street Irregulars (and much else).
“Disputation, Confrontation, and Dialectical Hullabaloo!” here
A new if incomplete key to the 1940 BSI dinner photograph.
Ask Thucydides!
Got a question about this website? or BSI history in general? Chris Redmond did.
Send it to AskThucydides@gmail.com, and read the answer here
What else is new?
Links of the Week, posted January 10th.
Jon Lellenberg
“Rodger Prescott of evil memory,” BSI