When I was in college, I discovered William Baring-Gould's The Annotated Sherlock Holmes. I read the whole thing one summer. It was from this work that I discovered that there are people who do not believe that Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson really lived, and who believe that one Arthur Conan Doyle not only wrote the stories but made up the characters.
In The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S Klinger considers the scholarship that has taken place since Baring-Gould's monumental work in the 1960s, and also takes into account that we are farther in time from the world of Holmes and Watson and that even more things need to be explained, especially to us Americans.
I recently read volumes one and two, which present all the short stories, in the sequence in which they were published in books. This puts them slightly out of the order in which they were written and the order in which they were first published in magazines, but I like it better than Baring-Gould's effort to present the stories in the order in which he felt they actually took place.
I enjoyed Klinger's footnotes and explanatory essays. I had never realized how many wicked colonels there are in the canon. And how many women named Violet. He takes a moderate view on the number of times Doctor Watson may have married.
Now I have to start saving for volume 3, which has the novels.
The Giants won their first game in San Francisco on 15-April-2008. Today they lost to Arizona. Last night they beat Randy Johnson.
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