Disjecta Membra: Stray Scraps of Irregular History, 1932-1950 Published 2001 by myself, 97 pp. In print: $15.00 postpaid in the United States Order from Hazelbaker & Lellenberg, P.O. Nox 32181, Santa Fe NM 87594. Disjecta Membra came after the concluding chronological volume for the 1940s, published in 1999, and was something of a supplement to those volumes and the preceding one on the 1930s, to bring between covers the Irregular correspondence and other documents that had come to me too late to be used in the chronological volumes. I ordered them in such a way to give, with the interconnective narrative I wrote, a capsule history of the BSI in the 1930s and ‘40s, so readers could relate the contents as closely as possible to the far more detailed chronological volumes. The letters and documents themselves were presented in facsimile form, giving followers of the Archival History their first real idea of what the series’ primary source material looks like. Disjecta Membra did not have a formal table of contents like the other volumes, but the following is the list of primary source materials it contains: Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, September 20, 1932 Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, July 27, 1933 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Frederic Dorr Steele, September 8, 1933 Letter, William Gillette to Vincent Starrett, October 15, 1933 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Elmer Davis, December 3, 1933 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Alexander Woollcott, April 4, 1934 Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, May 21, 1934 Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, May 29, 1934 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Frederic Dorr Steele, November 23, 1934 BSI membership list (Christopher Morley), 1934, amended 1939 Letter, Christopher Morley to Frederic Dorr Steele, January 3, 1936 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to S. C. Roberts, December 28, 1938 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to S. C. Roberts, January 24, 1939 (excerpt) Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, February 7, 1939 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, May 10, 1939 Letter, Alexander Woollcott to Vincent Starrett, July 31, 1939 Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, March 18, 1940 Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, November 11, 1940 Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, November 18, 1940 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, July 18, 1941 Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, September 29, 1941 Letter, Vincent Starrett to James Keddie Jr., May 21, 1942 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. T. Guymon Jr., June 23, 1942 BSI membership list (Edgar W. Smith), August 15, 1942 Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, October 20, 1942 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, November 10, 1942 Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, January 9, 1943 Letter, Vincent Starrett to C. R. Andrew, April 29, 1943 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, October 13, 1943 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Lee Wright, December 4, 1945 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, May 14, 1946 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Tom Mahoney, February 25, 1947 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. T. Guymon Jr., August 12, 1948 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Jerry Williamson, September 28, 1948 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. W. McDiarmid, November 11, 1947 Memorandum to BSJ subscribers, Ben Abramson, undated (late 1948) Report to BSI, Inc. Stockholders, Edgar W. Smith, January 15, 1950 Notice for the 1951 BSI annual dinner, Edgar W. Smith, October 15, 1950 Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, July 31, 1950, with excerpts from Boucher to Smith, June 12, 1560, Smith to Boucher, July 13, 1950, and Denis Conan Doyle to Smith, late July 1950. FOREWORD In assembling a collection of this sort, Watson might have put it this way: “When I glance over my notes and records of the BSI’s history between the years ’32 and ’50, I am faced by so many unavailable to me in time for the first five volumes of the Archival History, but which present strange and interesting features, that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.” For the fact is, continuing research has brought forth quite a lot of additional material too late for the volumes which covered the years in question, yet far too much for a compendium of this sort. But some of it has only a little to say about the events and the personalities of the BSI in those days, even though other items certainly possess points of interest. The return of the Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual in 1998 made it possible to offer the public a large quantity of additional information about the 1940 annual dinner, and that entire annus mirabilis which revived the BSI. But quite a few other newsworthy unread items about the BSI’s first two decades have remained in my files. So I have brought together here an assortment of Irregular correspondence and documents which, if not changing our understanding of the BSI’s history, certainly helps to fill out the picture we have of it, and illuminates further the key individuals who founded and shaped our sodality. And by presenting these thirty-nine exhibits in facsimile form (including Edgar W. Smith’s birth certificate on the back cover, plucked from the civic archives of Bethel, Conn.), followers of the BSI’s Archival History may see what letters from Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Edgar W. Smith actually looked like —what Irregulars in 1940 saw when they received the Buttons’ periodic bulletins to the BSI — who was on the membership lists that he occasionally included with them — the form which Ben Abramson’s appeals to BSJ subscribers for patience took — and also the form in which more bad news came to stockholders in the BSI, Inc. In a sense, this collection is for completists, the Sherlockians who have followed the BSI Archival History throughout, but I have tried to annotate the exhibits in a way which tells the BSI’s story, if sketchily, even for those who have not yet immersed them-selves in the Archival History so far. Certainly the contents track the main passages of that history fairly closely: Vin-cent Starrett’s creation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and other early stir-rings of Irregular scholarship, the founding of the BSI by Christopher Morley, and its early membership; the arrival on the scene of Edgar W. Smith, the BSI’s Buttons, a few years later; Starrett’s editing of 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes during the 1930s; the BSI’s revival in 1940 when it was published; the anomalous role of women in the Baker Street Irregularity of that era; the effects of World War II upon the BSI; Sherlockian collecting in that era; the BSI’s growing membership, and growing debate over membership policy; the development of the scion societies, and their relations with the Irregular home office in New York; publication of the second collection of BSI Writings About the Writings, Edgar W. Smith’s anthology Profile by Gaslight in 1944, which led to the creation of The Baker Street Journal in 1946; BSIncorporation a couple of years later; its business disappointments, and the BSJ in crisis, at the end of the 1940s; and the feud between the BSI and the Conan Doyle Estate, which went on into the 1950s whose history remains to be recorded. I owe thanks for this collection of correspondence and documents to a number of individuals and institutions, who made items for it available, or provided information about the men and women mentioned in them: Mrs. E. T. Guymon Jr., Paul Herbert, Jerry Margolin, Steven Rothman, Philip Shreffler, Bill Vande Water, Michael Whelan and Donald Yates, the Bowling Green State University Library, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota, and the Library of Congress. My apologies to anyone I have overlooked; I am constantly conscious of the fact that none of the BSI Archival History would be possible without the enthusiastic assistance and contributions of a great many people in this remarkably absorbing pastime of ours. _____________________________ From the book: The war had many important effects upon the BSI. Vincent Starrett’s letter of October 20, 1942, to Christopher Morley, praising the latter’s recent “Sonnet to Baker Street,” mentions his own new (now immortal) one, “221B,” whose sentiments were prompted by the thought of Baker Street under attack in the war, as Britain fought on. (Smith’s letter to Starrett, dated October 16, 1942, is in Irregular Records of the Early ‘Forties. Morley’s sonnet appeared in Smith’s Profile by Gaslight in 1944, a project already underway at the time of these letters.) “Books Alive,” Starrett’s newspaper column, soon shifted to the Chicago Tribune, and ran there for some twenty-five years of weekly bibliomania. Morley’s new novel was Thorofare. And the “new Sherlock tale” is the one discussed in the next letter, from Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, dated November 10, 1942 — “The Man Who Was Wanted,” found in A. Conan Doyle’s papers by his 1943 biographer Hesketh Pearson, who noted its shortcomings. There commenced a debate between the BSI and the Conan Doyle Estate over whether it should be published. Finally, in 1948, it was — only to be rapidly exposed (to the fury of Denis and Adrian Conan Doyle) as an imitation by an unknown architect named Arthur Whitaker. (See Irregular Crises of the Late ‘Forties, and the editor’s Nova 57 Minor, published by Jack Tracy’s Gaslight Publications in 1990.) Dear Chris: Edgar Smith has sent me (at my request: I’d never heard of it till he mentioned it) your Sonnet on Baker Street-- a stirring bugle note. Has it appeared in print? Is it to appear in any magazine? As bibliographer of the sleuth I must keep track of these matters. If it is not to appear formally, would you care to have me give it an informal publication in my series of Sherlockiana leaflets? I should greatly like to print it with my own sonnet, 221B, in an edition of about 50 copies. Old Ed Hill would love to print it, and I will confess that I should like to appear just across the page from you in a leaflet destined for such a glorious future in the auction rooms. If you haven’t seen my sonnet (I dedicated it to Edgar, and thought he would perhaps show it around a bit), you may be dubious about my suggestion; so I send a copy of 221B for your approval or disapproval. I realize, of course, that your sonnet may be awaiting publication in one of the big journals, and that my idea may be out of order. Don’t hesitate to slap me down. I’m doing a weekly (Wednesday) column about books-and-authors for the Daily News here, my alma mater, and hope it may survive. Just now it’s a trial flight. I look forward to the new novel, which should be along soon, I figure. Such announcements as I have seen suggest that it is autobiographical. That new Sherlock tale does sound a little weak; but we’ve got to have it. Best always! Faithfully Vincent Return to Books Return to the Welcome page

Disjecta Membra:

Stray Scraps of Irregular History, 1932-1950

Published 2001 by myself, 97 pp.

In print: $15.00 postpaid in the United States

Order from Hazelbaker & Lellenberg, P.O. Nox 32181, Santa Fe NM 87594.

Disjecta Membra came after the concluding chronological volume for the 1940s, published in 1999, and was something of a supplement to those volumes and the preceding one on the 1930s, to bring between covers the Irregular correspondence and other documents that had come to me too late to be used in the chronological volumes. I ordered them in such a way to give, with the interconnective narrative I wrote, a capsule history of the BSI in the 1930s and ‘40s, so readers could relate the contents as closely as possible to the far more detailed chronological volumes. The letters and documents themselves were presented in facsimile form, giving followers of the Archival History their first real idea of what the series’ primary source material looks like. Disjecta Membra did not have a formal table of contents like the other volumes, but the following is the list of primary source materials it contains:

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, September 20, 1932

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, July 27, 1933

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Frederic Dorr Steele, September 8, 1933

Letter, William Gillette to Vincent Starrett, October 15, 1933

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Elmer Davis, December 3, 1933

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Alexander Woollcott, April 4, 1934

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, May 21, 1934

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, May 29, 1934

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Frederic Dorr Steele, November 23, 1934

BSI membership list (Christopher Morley), 1934, amended 1939

Letter, Christopher Morley to Frederic Dorr Steele, January 3, 1936

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to S. C. Roberts, December 28, 1938

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to S. C. Roberts, January 24, 1939 (excerpt)

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, February 7, 1939

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, May 10, 1939

Letter, Alexander Woollcott to Vincent Starrett, July 31, 1939

Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, March 18, 1940

Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, November 11, 1940

Memorandum to the BSI, Edgar W. Smith, November 18, 1940

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, July 18, 1941

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, September 29, 1941

Letter, Vincent Starrett to James Keddie Jr., May 21, 1942

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. T. Guymon Jr., June 23, 1942

BSI membership list (Edgar W. Smith), August 15, 1942

Letter, Vincent Starrett to Christopher Morley, October 20, 1942

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, November 10, 1942

Letter, Christopher Morley to Vincent Starrett, January 9, 1943

Letter, Vincent Starrett to C. R. Andrew, April 29, 1943

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, October 13, 1943

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Lee Wright, December 4, 1945

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, May 14, 1946

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Tom Mahoney, February 25, 1947

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. T. Guymon Jr., August 12, 1948

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Jerry Williamson, September 28, 1948

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to E. W. McDiarmid, November 11, 1947

Memorandum to BSJ subscribers, Ben Abramson, undated (late 1948)

Report to BSI, Inc. Stockholders, Edgar W. Smith, January 15, 1950

Notice for the 1951 BSI annual dinner, Edgar W. Smith, October 15, 1950

Letter, Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, July 31, 1950, with excerpts from Boucher to Smith, June 12, 1560, Smith to Boucher, July 13, 1950, and Denis Conan Doyle to Smith, late July 1950.

FOREWORD

In assembling a collection of this sort, Watson might have put it this way: “When I glance over my notes and records of the BSI’s history between the years ’32 and ’50, I am faced by so many unavailable to me in time for the first five volumes of the Archival History, but which present strange and interesting features, that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.”

For the fact is, continuing research has brought forth quite a lot of additional material too late for the volumes which covered the years in question, yet far too much for a compendium of this sort. But some of it has only a little to say about the events and the personalities of the BSI in those days, even though other items certainly possess points of interest. The return of the Baker Street Journal Christmas Annual in 1998 made it possible to offer the public a large quantity of additional information about the 1940 annual dinner, and that entire annus mirabilis which revived the BSI. But quite a few other newsworthy unread items about the BSI’s first two decades have remained in my files. So I have brought together here an assortment of Irregular correspondence and documents which, if not changing our understanding of the BSI’s history, certainly helps to fill out the picture we have of it, and illuminates further the key individuals who founded and shaped our sodality.

And by presenting these thirty-nine exhibits in facsimile form (including Edgar W. Smith’s birth certificate on the back cover, plucked from the civic archives of Bethel, Conn.), followers of the BSI’s Archival History may see what letters from Vincent Starrett, Christopher Morley, and Edgar W. Smith actually looked like —what Irregulars in 1940 saw when they received the Buttons’ periodic bulletins to the BSI — who was on the membership lists that he occasionally included with them — the form which Ben Abramson’s appeals to BSJ subscribers for patience took — and also the form in which more bad news came to stockholders in the BSI, Inc. In a sense, this collection is for completists, the Sherlockians who have followed the BSI Archival History throughout, but I have tried to annotate the exhibits in a way which tells the BSI’s story, if sketchily, even for those who have not yet immersed them-selves in the Archival History so far.

Certainly the contents track the main passages of that history fairly closely: Vin-cent Starrett’s creation of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and other early stir-rings of Irregular scholarship, the founding of the BSI by Christopher Morley, and its early membership; the arrival on the scene of Edgar W. Smith, the BSI’s Buttons, a few years later; Starrett’s editing of 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes during the 1930s; the BSI’s revival in 1940 when it was published; the anomalous role of women in the Baker Street Irregularity of that era; the effects of World War II upon the BSI; Sherlockian collecting in that era; the BSI’s growing membership, and growing debate over membership policy; the development of the scion societies, and their relations with the Irregular home office in New York; publication of the second collection of BSI Writings About the Writings, Edgar W. Smith’s anthology Profile by Gaslight in 1944, which led to the creation of The Baker Street Journal in 1946; BSIncorporation a couple of years later; its business disappointments, and the BSJ in crisis, at the end of the 1940s; and the feud between the BSI and the Conan Doyle Estate, which went on into the 1950s whose history remains to be recorded.

I owe thanks for this collection of correspondence and documents to a number of individuals and institutions, who made items for it available, or provided information about the men and women mentioned in them: Mrs. E. T. Guymon Jr., Paul Herbert, Jerry Margolin, Steven Rothman, Philip Shreffler, Bill Vande Water, Michael Whelan and Donald Yates, the Bowling Green State University Library, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the University of Minnesota, and the Library of Congress. My apologies to anyone I have overlooked; I am constantly conscious of the fact that none of the BSI Archival History would be possible without the enthusiastic assistance and contributions of a great many people in this remarkably absorbing pastime of ours.

_____________________________

From the book:

The war had many important effects upon the BSI. Vincent Starrett’s letter of October 20, 1942, to Christopher Morley, praising the latter’s recent “Sonnet to Baker Street,” mentions his own new (now immortal) one, “221B,” whose sentiments were prompted by the thought of Baker Street under attack in the war, as Britain fought on. (Smith’s letter to Starrett, dated October 16, 1942, is in Irregular Records of the Early ‘Forties. Morley’s sonnet appeared in Smith’s Profile by Gaslight in 1944, a project already underway at the time of these letters.)

“Books Alive,” Starrett’s newspaper column, soon shifted to the Chicago Tribune, and ran there for some twenty-five years of weekly bibliomania. Morley’s new novel was Thorofare. And the “new Sherlock tale” is the one discussed in the next letter, from Edgar W. Smith to Anthony Boucher, dated November 10, 1942 — “The Man Who Was Wanted,” found in A. Conan Doyle’s papers by his 1943 biographer Hesketh Pearson, who noted its shortcomings. There commenced a debate between the BSI and the Conan Doyle Estate over whether it should be published. Finally, in 1948, it was — only to be rapidly exposed (to the fury of Denis and Adrian Conan Doyle) as an imitation by an unknown architect named Arthur Whitaker. (See Irregular Crises of the Late ‘Forties, and the editor’s Nova 57 Minor, published by Jack Tracy’s Gaslight Publications in 1990.)

Dear Chris:

Edgar Smith has sent me (at my request: I’d never heard of it till he mentioned it) your Sonnet on Baker Street-- a stirring bugle note. Has it appeared in print? Is it to appear in any magazine? As bibliographer of the sleuth I must keep track of these matters. If it is not to appear formally, would you care to have me give it an informal publication in my series of Sherlockiana leaflets? I should greatly like to print it with my own sonnet, 221B, in an edition of about 50 copies. Old Ed Hill would love to print it, and I will confess that I should like to appear just across the page from you in a leaflet destined for such a glorious future in the auction rooms. If you haven’t seen my sonnet (I dedicated it to Edgar, and thought he would perhaps show it around a bit), you may be dubious about my suggestion; so I send a copy of 221B for your approval or disapproval. I realize, of course, that your sonnet may be awaiting publication in one of the big journals, and that my idea may be out of order. Don’t hesitate to slap me down.

I’m doing a weekly (Wednesday) column about books-and-authors for the Daily News here, my alma mater, and hope it may survive. Just now it’s a trial flight.

I look forward to the new novel, which should be along soon, I figure. Such announcements as I have seen suggest that it is autobiographical.

That new Sherlock tale does sound a little weak; but we’ve got to have it.

Best always!

Faithfully

Vincent

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Return to the Welcome page