get out your magnifying glass

Great article in the NYTimes about the auction of the Authur Conan Doyle archive.

For 25 years the cardboard boxes, more than a dozen of them, sat in a corner of a London office, gathering dust while lawyers argued about whom they belonged to and scholars dreamed about what was inside. But the auction this Wednesday of their contents, once belonging to Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has provoked another fight and a mystery almost worthy of Holmes himself.

The Conan Doyle archive — including his unpublished first novel, a rich cache of family letters and handwritten literary notebooks full of research and musings about works in progress — is expected to bring in about £1 million to £1.5 million ($1.8 million to $2.7 million), according to Christie's, which is handling the sale. But even as that auction house has attracted a stream of Conan Doyle enthusiasts thrilled at the newly released material, it has also been sharply criticized by some scholars and members of Parliament for allowing the sale because they say crucial legal questions remain unresolved.

And a few other little things...

Matthew Cheney has an excellent little story, "Prague," up at Ideomancer. (Via the invaluable and newly spiffed Write Hemisphere.) Cheney's blog The Mumpsimus is always interesting and it's nice to see some of his other writing. From Ideomancer's introduction of the story:

He wrote "Prague", he says, after reading parts of a biography of Karel Capek that a friend brought back to him from Prague, and from watching a bunch of Jan Svankmajer's movies one after the other.

It's a dreamy surreal story anchored in very real emotion. It's hard to do short and surreal well, and "Prague" manages it with style to spare. So, check it out.

Stupid Evil Alert re: this "anti-homosexual agenda" father-daughter team profiled in the Wash Post.

And also from the Wash Post (Barth alert!): the USDA was violating its public policy of not admitting beef from Canada.

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The Say...why aren't we crying? proof should show up today and the lovely, perfect, timely copies soon thereafter. We won't breathe a sigh of relief until then, but it looks like we're on schedule to debut a very strong issue at Wiscon over Memorial Day weekend. If you run a website that does reviews of fine short fiction/poetry/comics or work for a magazine, etc., that does reviews of such -- and aren't already on our reviewer mailing list -- and would like a review copy, please send me an email (available at the bottom of my profile page linked at the top of this one). I'll try and get around to posting a cover image and re-post the TOC.

And now, grindstone.... nose...