Patience
By Don Hobbs

I have exhibited the wonderful virtue of patience for the past four years. This is how long it has taken me to get a book because it arrived in my mail box this week. I have patiently waitd to tell the Sherlockian world about this adventure in book collecting but refused to mention it until I could actually held it in my hand, lest I reveal everything too early and have the book get lost and never appear again. So I waited and waited and waited some more.  The wait is over and I am holding the book, so here is the story.

For four years I was searching the Internet, looking for a Macedonian translation of the Canon. In Ronald B. De Waal's The Universal Sherlock Holmes, he lists one translation for Macedonian. The book in question was Avanturite na ?erlok Holms. Listed as C-3526 the book was published in Skopje by Ko?o Racin and included The Adventures, The Memoirs and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. It was translated into Macedonian by Mr. Tomo Momirovski and  I succeeded in finding a website for the Macedonian Translators Union.

Going down the listing for all of the translators, I was surprised to find the name Tomo Momirovski. Not being from Macedonia  I was not sure if this was a common name or indeed the translator of the book listed in De Waal. There was not an email address just a physical mailing address in Skopje, Macedonia. I decided I would take a chance and write to Mr. Momirovski. In my letter I explained that I was a Sherlockian from the United States,  I collected foreign language translations of the Canon and I wanted to know if he was the translator in question.

I received an email from Mr. Momirovski about two weeks later. He was using his granddaughter's email and he was totally amazed that someone in the United States was aware of his translation, done forty years earlier when he was a college student. He was so excited that he said it was now his personal mission to locate a copy of the book for me. He did not own one but would start asking all of his colleagues. He told me that 'A Macedonian never forgets' and he would find me a copy of the book.

Two years passed with only an occasional email from his granddaughter, Bela. Mr. Momirovski did not have email and did not particularly care using it. In January 2006 I had an email saying that a copy of the book had finally been found. Bela asked me for my postal address and I sat back waiting on my book. I continued waiting and for more than a year, my emails to Bela went unanswered. The book never arrived. That is until last Thursday.

I got home Thursday from Wisconsin and low and behold I found a package from Macedonia waiting for me. The book arrived along with an apologetic note, explaining that Bela had been out of the country and unable to send the book. She also apologized profusely for not sending it sooner. In the ensuing four years, I found another Macedonian translation but one that arrived last week is special. It is the result of hard work and a bit of patience.

Happy Collecting!!