AST weekend, I received an email from a college-age friend of mine wondering if he should spend what little money he had on Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, or, well… eat. To which I replied: “There are plenty of places to find semi-edible sustenance, from the mushrooms under rotten logs to the bins behind restaurants. And you’re still young enough to recover from short-term malnutrition.”

A little poking around for opinions which mean far more than my own yielded the following review in the UK Guardian: A four-pipe poseur.

As a single reference work designed to bring Baring-Gould’s original annotated edition up to date, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes seems unlikely to be superseded for some time. There is no more comprehensive repository of arcane Sherlockiana to be found in one place. Yet the curious situation remains that the more information one stores up about the detective, the less one actually seems to know. No amount of erudite commentary can alter the fact that Holmes remains an unfathomable enigma, as much a product of the information Conan Doyle withheld as the tenuous clues to his character he actually put down.

Amazon.com has a pretty good price right now, certainly better than the prices at my regional megastore. And remember, Dan: it is possible to live off no-name peanut butter, Mr. Noodles, and a dandelion/fern shoot salad (from the nearest park or ditch, of course), at least for three months or so. You can even make coffee by dry-roasting the dandelion roots. Just spring for an orange if the teeth get too loose.