Arch-Enemy of the
Typo Reduction Team

As many of you may have noticed, The Holmes & Watson Report’s March (or was it January?) issue included a few really large blunders as a part of the entertainment. Whether it was the wrong cover date, the reassignment of the BSI weekend to April, or the stray dollar sign appearing in the text for no reason whatsoever, March 1999 was just not a pinnacle of the proof-reading art.

Hopefully most of you got past the horror inspired by such bloopers and enjoyed the quality content provided by our contributors, but for those of you who didn’t, here’s the place to direct your ire: the fellow with “Publisher, Editor-In-Chief, and Absolute Scapegoat” under his name on the inside cover. He’s the villain who changes things after the typo reduction team does their careful job (when he lets them see the material at all). He’s the laggard who sloppily tosses the calendar keepers’ work into those little boxes. He is the Napoleon of typos, Watson.

Every other month, veteran editors Robert C. Burr and Kathryn R. Carter do their best to contain the rampant chaos that surrounds the pre-print process. But if an illness in the family or a heavy workload at the real job takes their full attention from the work for an instant . . . well, never doubt the abilities of an old hand from a newspaper composing room to mess up even the best watched work. “Damn the typos; get the thing on the press,” is the newspaper compositor’s battle cry. And while it gets the job done, it provides endless frustration for those whose ultimate goal in life is the perfection of all things.

Do they give up? Do they flee from their losses in the face of an overwhelming tide of misplaced punctuation and bizarre grammar? Amazingly, no. Of course, the fact that both editors Burr and Carter live within a hundred-yard radius of The Holmes & Watson Report’s underground nerve center might be one reason. (They could run, but they wouldn’t get far.)

In any case, I’d like to heap praise on the entire staff of The Holmes & Watson Report as we begin one more issue. Every one of them continues to be a reliable source of help and inspiration as this little publication continues running its marathon of bimonthly mailings. I probably could could get something into your mailbox without them, but that something would just look a lot worse than last issue even came close to. A lot worse. (The new permanent heading for the editorial column would read, “Whoops!”)

So as you enjoy the issue, if you catch us in a goof-up, you know who to tell:

Brad Keefauver
Napoleon of Typos,
Publisher, Editor-In-Chief,
and Absolute Scapegoat

P.S. By the way, this is our first (if not the entire Sherlockian publishing world’s first) Mother’s Day Special. You might let it serve as a reminder to poke your head out of the Sherlockian library for a moment on May 9th and hand the dear lady a card (or maybe even wrap up one of those extra copies of The Hound of the Baskervilles for her — mothers are partial to those nice Reader’s Digest editions).