There are Sherlock Holmes novels. And there are novels starring Sherlock Holmes. There’s a difference, a subtle one, but still a difference. A Sherlock Holmes novel has the usual trappings — the client upon the stair, a few cuts at the violin strings, some deduction, a hansom cab out on a dark night on a … Continue reading The Martian Menace
Author: Allyn Gibson
A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.
Throughout January I worked, off and on, on something of a private project, to make an ebook of Ellery Queen’s long-out-of-print anthology, The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes. An anthology of Sherlock Holmes parodies, sprinkled with a few genuine pastiches and two play scripts, essentially a survey of non-Doyle Sherlock Holmes literature to mid-century, The Misadventures … Continue reading The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes: Making an eBook
Recently while digging around on the Library of Congress website I found a series of photographs of young women playing baseball. The photos were undated; they had a range between 1909 and 1923, nothing more specific. The uniforms resembled those worn by Ida Schnall’s New York Female Giants in 1913, though without the stitched logo … Continue reading Women Playing Baseball in the 1910s
Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. Just … Continue reading I Was Told There Would Be No Math
You haven’t lived until you’ve digitally clipped mid-19th-century cursive from a scan of a faded and dirty print. This is B.F. Smith’s landscape of Washington, showing projected improvements in the capital city — the Washington Monument, a stone bridge across the Washington City Canal — from 1852. I found this on the Library of Congress … Continue reading Revisiting the Washington That Never Was
A week and a half ago I discovered Adolph Sachse’s “bird’s eye view” map of Washington, DC, circa 1883-1884, and I was able to find where my ancestors lived in Washington from the Civil War to the mid-1880s. There was something else I was interested in. Swampoodle Grounds. Swampoodle Grounds, also known as Capitol Park, … Continue reading Revisiting Swampoodle Grounds
After writing on Tuesday about an unlicensed Monty Python/Beatles t-shirt that amused me, yesterday saw a package stuffed in my mailbox — an unlicensed Washington Nationals World Series t-shirt. After the Nationals won the World Series, my Facebook feed was filled with ads for unofficial Nats World Series merchandise. Especially unofficial t-shirts. I bought an … Continue reading Starring Snoopy, a World Series T-Shirt
My Facebook feed — and yours, too, I’m sure — is filled with ads for bootleg, unlicensed t-shirts and has been for at least three years. I was going to write “months” there instead of “years,” but I remember that, when I was in Chicago on business in 2017, I saw someone wearing an unlicensed … Continue reading A Silly Walk Across Abbey Road
A few months ago, the novelist Howard Weinstein posted to Facebook a link to Adolph Sachse’s “Bird’s Eye View” map of Baltimore in 1869, and I poured over it, finding the location where my great-great-grandmother and her father lived at the time and the church where my great-grandparents might have married in 1900, as it … Continue reading Exploring an 1883 Map of Washington, DC
This morning I turned in my Angel Tree package at work. This year, it was for a seven year-old boy. When I was seven, my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The book is well-loved and sits, to this day, on the bookshelf in my dining room. I tried to get … Continue reading An Angel Tree Package
I happened to turn around and caught a glimpse of the rising moon through my office window.
On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s harbor. One of the ships, the Mont-Blanc, carrying munitions en route to Europe, caught fire and, shortly after 9 o’clock local time, the cargo exploded, laying waste to the city and surrounding communities, killing (officially) two thousand and injuring nearly 10,000 more, in what’s … Continue reading The Coldest December