If you could publish anything . . .

If you could publish anything, what would you publish?

Sherlockiana has always had its share of small presses, limited print runs, vanity press books, and gettting-stuff-into-print-with-whatever-reproduction-device-was-available. Our love of our subject matter pushes us to get things out in whatever means is available to us in a given moment in time.

Someday it will be fun to see a University of Minnesota exhibit on "Sherlockiana Through Time" to see how we evolved in our publishing, but as we're still living the history that will be in that exhibit one day, what do we publish now?

I suppose it depends upon your skillset, pocketbook, and desire. Skillset, because you either have to write something or convince someone else to let you collect or reprint something of theirs. Pocketbook, because most available forms of print reproduction take a little money. And desire . . . ah, desire is both our curse and our magic power. Desire can turn into drive, and drive tends to get things done. Not always, of course. And that old notion of "anyone can achieve anything" is a bit dreamy. But if you've got enough desire to push you past the excuses, sometimes its enough.

Just getting one thing into print is often enough to prime the pump and set other ventures into motion.

Sometimes that one thing is the thing you wanted most to that point. Sometimes it's just something less important that you just did for whatever reason of the moment -- when Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, he plainly wasn't trying to do the one thing that would have satisfied him, or else he would have kept writing Sherlock and nothing else. But getting that one thing in print opened his life up to do so much more writing than if he hadn't.

More on this subject to come . . . .