“Good old index. You can’t beat it.”– Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”
I agree with Holmes!
One of
the delights of having a personal library, even a modest one like mine, is
occasionally rediscovering a forgotten treasure. William D. Goodrich’s Good Old Index was just that for me.
For
some forgotten reason I have two editions, the original from 1987 and The New Good Old Index from 1994. Both
were published by Gasogene Press, then based in Dubuque. I keep the second one
near my computer, where I know that I will refer to it often in the coming
years.
The
original “good old index” Sherlock Holmes’s giant book of clippings about all
sorts of people, crimes, and phenomenon. His collection of M’s was a fine one,
you will recall!
Goodrich’s
Index is a kind of Concordance to the
Holmes Canon. Almost any topic you can think of shows up within its 602 pages,
along with the story in which it appears and the page of its first reference in
the most common edition the Canon, the Doubleday Complete Sherlock Holmes.
This
is pure gold for a Sherlockian writing a scholarly article or a pastiche. For
example, I have recently consulted the Index
to find which Canonical stories mention South African gold shares, secret
societies, Sussex, Australia, South Africa, fog, fishing, the devil, ciphers
and codes, Canada, wills, public houses, and commonplace books. And they were
all there!
Lately
I’ve been looking to trim my library, but this book is a keeper in both
editions.
I will add it to my collection. Thanks for the heads up
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