Calling All Burmese. Calling All Burmese.
by Don Hobbs

I know by now everyone has heard about The Galactic Sherlock Holmes. I have been working on my bibliographic database of non-English Sherlock Holmes for several years now and am incredibly close to completing the first phase. I am very excited and would like to share a few more bits of information regarding the project.

Using Ron De Waal's The Universal Sherlock Holmes as a starting point, I copied the foreign language section but I stripped out the listings for parodies, pastiches, and anything else that was non-Canonical. I added sections for Braille, Shorthand (both Pitman and Gregg) and other listings that are not really languages such as Dancing Men, Deseret, and Ebonics. I streamlined the information listing Title, translator, city of publication, publisher's name, illustrators name if applicable, date of publication, the number of pages, and the contents. I have also added scans of the book covers and all of NIDW (Not In De Waal) entries. This includes the nearly twenty languages not in De Waal.

I am like many Americans in that I do not speak any language other than English. The internet and wealth of friends have helped me with languages that do not use a Roman alphabet. When I started my project, I needed help with the books I owned in Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Burmese, Chinese, Farsi, Georgian, Greek, Gujarati,  Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese, Marathi, Mongolian, Russian, Sinhala, Thai, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese. I soon found co-workers who were able to help me with several of the languages.

For the past year I have been in an overdrive mode, seeking help with the few remaining languages. The  two remaining ones were Bengali and Burmese. I tried every possible means to find help. I sent hundreds of emails to everyone in the International Bengali society.  It must have seemed like one of those email spam messages and I have received zero responses to these emails. I repeated the effort for Burmese and received the same response - zero.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by fellow Sherlockian Joseph Coppola. Joseph is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Technology at Morrisville State College in Morrisville, New York and thought he might be able to find someone at the college who could help with the missing Burmese information. I promptly sent him the information I needed.  I am still waiting on the Burmese help to arrive. In the meantime, Joseph's wife, Elaine sent me an email inquiring about the Bengali information. Elaine Coppola is a librarian at Syracuse University for Government Information, Political Science, and International Relations: Social Sciences & Area Studies Department. She thought she knew someone who could help.

This week I had an email from Gurnek Singh, who is the Asian Studies Librarian at Syracuse University. As it turns out Sherlock Holmes is also his favorite hero and he was able to provide me with the missing information for all of my Bengali books.

There are now just eleven Burmese books for which I need bibliographic information. So I am calling all Burmese! Calling all Burmese! Come on Joseph, are you going to let Elaine beat you in this manor? 

I do thank everyone out there who has helped me in the wonderful project.

Happy Collecting!!