Happy Birthday, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!Doyle, a Scottish physician and writer, is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of crime fiction’s most beloved characters.
Holmes—and his intrepid sidekick Watson—first appeared in A Study in Scarlet, published in the 1886 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. Holmes was partially modeled after Joseph Bell, Doyle’s former university professor. Doyle wrote to Bell, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes… [R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man.”
In December of 1893, Doyle resolved to concentrate on what he considered his more important work—his historical novels. He had Holmes and Professor Moriarty plunge to their (ostensible) deaths in “The Final Problem.” Public outcry demanded that he revive his much loved sleuth. He did so in 1901’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, first published in Strand Magazine. He set the novel before the “The Final Problem.” Holmes was officially revived in 1903’s “The Adventure of the Empty House, ” in which he explains Moriarty’s death and his own miraculous survival.
Pictured: 1) a 1901 publicity poster announcing the publication of Hound of the Baskervilles. It was illustrated by Albert Morrow. 2) Front cover of the original publisher’s binding, designed by Alfred Garth Jones. It sports a silhouette of a hound, printed in black amidst red cloth and gold accents.
The MOOCman cometh
Picasso, 1953
Children attendants gather supplies for an Arab diner in Algeria, February 1928.
Photograph by Jules Gervais Courtellemont, National Geographic
An ex-neighbour of ours recalled (in an otherwise entirely kind and welcome comment) me telling him, years ago, that my SF novels effectively subsidised the mainstream works. I think he’s just misremembered, as this has never been the case. Until the last few years or so, when the SF novels started to achieve something approaching parity in sales, the mainstream always out-sold the SF – on average, if my memory isn’t letting me down, by a ratio of about three or four to one. I think a lot of people have assumed that the SF was the trashy but high-selling stuff I had to churn out in order to keep a roof over my head while I wrote the important, serious, non-genre literary novels. Never been the case, and I can’t imagine that I’d have lied about this sort of thing, least of all as some sort of joke. The SF novels have always mattered deeply to me – the Culture series in particular – and while it might not be what people want to hear (academics especially), the mainstream subsidised the SF, not the other way round.
In the case of MOOCs (or other ways of chunking online instruction), Harvard could impose burdensome licensing rules in an effort to protect the scholarly professionals elsewhere. (Just as the Wall Street Journal is now Online but hardly Open.) But of course UC [the University of California system] would then utilize someone else’s product, resulting in lower quality instruction at UC, perhaps at a higher price. Would we at Harvard then sleep better, knowing that if any philosophers had been laid off in California, it was not because of OUR MOOC?
On May 17, 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was formed. Pictured here are two stock certificates, which can be found in the Newberry collections. The first is for three shares of the Pullman Palace Car Company. The certificate sports illustrations of St. Pancras Station in London and the Pullman Car Works in Detroit. The second certificate, also for Pullman, is equal to one hundred shares. It has an engraving of George M. Pullman.