The Maniac Collector's Inbox
No. 361, May 5, 2009

Sherlockian Potpourri
By Don Hobbs

Last week was a busy one for me. I spent three days in San Diego, where I stayed in the Old Town section of the city. My sole Sherlockian experience was an afternoon visit to the local mystery bookstore where I picked up a copy of Laurie R. King's latest Mary Russell novel. The Language of Bees (Bantam Books, 2009) is the ninth in the series. Ms. King will be in Boston this week. I will also be in Boston and I hope to get it signed. I also bought the hard cover edition of Lyndsay Faye's Dust and Shadows Simon & Schuster, 2009). Ms. Faye will not be in Boston.

If anyone will be traveling in California and happen to be in or near Long Beach on Sunday, May 17, they might check out "Sherlock Holmes and a Scandal in Bohemia" at the Richard Goad Theatre, 4250 Atlantic Avenue. The play starts at 2 PM and tickets are $20. This is an original play by Helen Borges, presented by Long Beach Shakespeare Company. For more information contact John Farrell via email at johnfarrellbsi@hotmail.com. I attended another Sherlockian play back in 2003 and although I cannot remember the name of the play I do remember the theater as being cozy. I am sure this was not just because I was setting next to Mr. Farrell.

As I was perusing the SherlockPeoria Archives, desperately searching to see if I had wrote about the play mentioned in the paragraph above, I came across an article from December 11, 2005. "December Sherlocking" was a rambling sort like today's article. What caught my eye was the final paragraph that stated 'I now have similar pdf file for every language and for every book in that language that I am missing information on to complete The Galactic Sherlock Holmes. They are Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Chinese, Farsi, Greek, Gujarati; Hebrew; Hindi, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Marathi, Mongolian, Russian, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Urdu, and Vietnamese.' The first thing I noticed was that I mention completing he Galactic Sherlock Holmes. Second is how much information I have amassed since then.

I just completed version 9.5 (May 2009) of The Galactic Sherlock Holmes. The latest
edition is now 770 pages! I have complete bibliographic information on all of the languages mentioned above and hope to see the arrivals of translations from Tajik and Azerbaijani this week. The GSH has a nice plug in the April issue of Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press, Peter Blau's excellent newsletter. Someone who read about the GSH in this newsletter will be traveling to Turkmenistan and has offered to search for a Turkmen translation. It is encouraging when total strangers offer to help. I know from the stories told to me by John Bennett Shaw that this was the way so many of his foreign language books came to be.  I have more than twenty languages that were not in John's collection. I can only imagine the numbers if he had had access to the Internet. It is good to be a collection in these modern times.

This reminds me that I actually had another Sherlockian experience in San Diego last week. I was having dinner with my co-worker John Stittsworth and his wife Linda. The conversation turned toward Sherlock Holmes and my collection. On the subject of foreign translations, Linda mentioned she had a close friend living in Kyrgyzstan and that they were a very literate society. We speculated that since all of the surrounding countries had translations of the Canon, that there was a good possibility there could be a Kyrgyz translation. So I hope to look back when today's article has been in archive for three and a half years and marvel once again at how much has been added to The Galactic Sherlock Holmes.

 Happy Collecting!!

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January 4, 2009
Sherlockian Potpourri