#ArthurConanDoyle

The Mirror: News, Sport, Celebrity & Entertainmentmirror.co.uk@web.brid.gy
2026-02-16

Curse of those who opened Tutankhamun's tomb - poison insect bite, fire, flood and murder

fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.mirr

2026-02-12

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

I’m not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjurer gets no credit once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 4 [Holmes], Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #sherlockholmes #holmes #behindthecurtain #conjurer #explanation #falsemodesty #magictrick #magician #mystery #secret #selfdeprecating #selfeffacing

2026-02-11

#TFW the magazine proof arrives and all is right: a lovely layout, interesting and beautifully drawn illustrations, fun typography, a light touch of copy editing that makes the thing better. I can hardly wait until I can show actual photos.
#writing #sherlockholmes #arthurconandoyle #reading
GIF
7:56 PM · Feb 10, 2026

2026-02-06

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

“They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,” he [Holmes] remarked with a smile. “It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 3, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #holmes #sherlockholmes #carefulness #detective #genius #method #takingpains #thoroughness #effort #focus

Traianvssergiofrutos
2026-02-03

¡Lectura terminada! 🔍 Acabo de cerrar "Las aventuras de Sherlock Holmes". No importa cuánto tiempo pase, la brillantez deductiva de Holmes y la fiel compañía de Watson en el 221B de Baker Street nunca pasan de moda. Un clásico imprescindible que redefine el misterio en cada relato. 🕵️‍♂️📚

¿Cuál es vuestro caso favorito de esta colección? El mío sigue siendo "Escándalo en Bohemia".

2026-01-30

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

   “You don’t seem to give much thought to the matter in hand,” I said at last, interrupting Holmes’s musical disquisition.
   “No data yet,” he answered. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 3, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #sherlockholmes #holmes #sherlock #conclusion #consideration #data #evidence #hypothesis #insufficientdata #theory #thought #proof #confirmationbias #prematureconclusion

2026-01-22

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 3 [Holmes], Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #sherlockholmes #sherlock #certainty #cogitation #deduction #explanation #knowledge #understanding #proof

Ken Everett (Ken's Blogspot)kensbookinfo
2026-01-22

by

The novel that helped spark a revolution. A powerful, emotional anti-slavery classic that changed history. 🏠⚖️🕯️

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by Sir

A brutal murder and a secret society. Sherlock Holmes faces a mystery that leads him toward his greatest rival, Moriarty. 🕵️‍♂️🕸️🎩

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2019

Ken Everett (Ken's Blogspot)kensbookinfo
2026-01-22

by Sir

The historical first meeting of Holmes and Watson! Join them as they solve a murder that spans from London to Salt Lake Valley. 🕵️‍♂️🤝🩸

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by

Fascinating stories that leap from prehistoric life to the distant future. Wells at his imaginative and speculative best! 🚀⏳🦴

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2019

Ken Everett (Ken's Blogspot)kensbookinfo
2026-01-22

by

The Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, must navigate love, heartbreak, and financial ruin with both logic and emotion. 🕯️💖🎻

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by Sir

Stolen treasure and a mysterious pact! Sherlock Holmes is at his deductive best in this classic race through London. 💎🕵️‍♂️🚣‍♂️

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2019

Ken Everett (Ken's Blogspot)kensbookinfo
2026-01-22

by Sir

A spectral hound and a family curse on the foggy moors. Can Sherlock Holmes solve the mystery before the beast strikes again? 🐾🌫️🕵️‍♂️

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by

Love, obsession, and tragedy set against the majestic bells of 15th-century Paris. Quasimodo and Esmeralda's story is an epic epic. 🔔🕍🇫🇷

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2019

Ken Everett (Ken's Blogspot)kensbookinfo
2026-01-22

by

Dive into the thunderous drama of the French Revolution, where love and sacrifice collide against the shadow of the guillotine. 🇫🇷⚖️💔

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by

Raft down the mighty Mississippi with Huck and Jim in this definitive American masterpiece of freedom and friendship. 🛶🌊🌟

Read here: kensbookinfo.blogspot.com/2018

by Sir

Plunder, Mystery, and Intrigue: Visiting the British Museum and the British Library

After leaving the Lake District, I traveled to London by train, for the third part of my trip. This was where I saw the most libraries during my trip. On my last day in London, August 3rd, I visited the British Museum, located in London’s West End, which was overcrowded with tourists. This made viewing the so-called “chronicle of Western collection,” which was acquired through extensive plunder and theft, as American tour guide Rick Steves describes the museum, very uncomfortable. Even so, there were two highlights. The first was the stately and round reading room. English writers Virginia Woolf and Beatrix Potter, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, radical thinkers Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, women’s rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst, independence activist Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Irish author Bram Stoker all studied there.

Note: This serves as second part of my series on this blog about my library tourism last year, with the first part, about my attempted and successful library tourism in Edinburgh and Northern England, posted on this blog last week. The series begins, chronologically, with my guest post on Reel Librarians, on February 11th, in a post entitled “Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland: Library tourism redux.” It will be reposted on here over a month later. There will be one more parts of this series, focusing on my continued library tourism in Belgium coming next week.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as noted in Doyle’s “The Complete Sherlock Holmes,” studied in the reading room. In the 1893 short story “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” (sometimes abbreviated as “The Musgrave Ritual”), he studied “those branches of science which might make me more efficient” in the reading room. He learned other information from the British Museum in chapter 15 of 1902 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles and “The Tiger of San Pedro” chapter, within a 1917 collection entitled His Last Bow: Some Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (sometimes abbreviated as “His Last Bow”). There are mentions of libraries in the short stories “The Five Orange Pips”, “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”, and “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet” in the 1892 short story collection The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

The same is the case for “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The ‘Gloria Scott’”, and “The Reigate Squires” all within the 1893 short story collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and the stories “The Adventures of the Three Students” and “The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez” in the 1905 short story collection The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Apart from that, chapter 10 of The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapter 7 of the 1915 novel The Valley of Fear, and the story “The Problem of Thorn Bridge” in the 1927 set of short stories The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes feature libraries as well. Lastly, there’s a mention of a London Library in St. James’s Square and Lomax, who is said to be a “sublibrarian,” in “The Illustrious Client.” This is another short story within The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.

In an email communication, Nathalie Belkin, an archivist who works for the London Library, told me that Doyle was a library member, joining in 1896 after his friend, and fellow writer, Arthur Griffith, nominated him. According to Belkin, Doyle was an active library user, even serving on the library’s committee. In fact, it is believed that The Illustrious Client, also entitled The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, was written in the library’s main reading room. While the borrowing history from the time has been lost, he was a “well-known fixture” of the library.

Otherwise, Karl Marx formulated ideas on communism, including within Das Kapital (also known as Capital), in the aforementioned reading room within the British Museum. Displays within the room describe it as a place for diverse thought. Many patrons left behind their mark in the visitors log. It was even one of the first places in London to have electric light (in 1879)! The room could, at maximum, hold 302 readers sitting at 38 tables, sitting across from each other, and was heated from underneath. Readers would consult a catalogue of printed books in the room’s center, then fill out a request form. In some ways, this makes this room similar to the Library of Congress’s Reading Room, since books for the British Library could be accessed there until they were moved to their current location in 1997. In fact, 62,000 people came when this reading room opened in 1857. A sign, when looking into the reading room, tells visitors to be quiet, feeding into the common conception of libraries as quiet places, which is not always the case for all libraries anymore.

Compilation of four photographs of the Reading Room within the British Library, taken on August 3, 2025 (Photographs by me. Sorry for the blurriness in one of these photos)

What Rick Steves didn’t mention is that the historic reading room only re-opened to the public in 2024 after being closed for eleven years. The room was designed by Sydney Smirke, inspired by Rome’s domed Pantheon, and opened in 1857. It first re-opened to visitors in 2000 (after it stopped being an active reading room in 1997), then closed in 2013, when it was used for archival storage. The room, described by some as “legendary,” “stunning,” and an impressive sight for bibliophiles (protagonist and book-defender Elianna Bernstein of Bibliophile Princess would be right at home there) is not technically a library anymore. You can’t borrow any of the 25,000 books, and photography is now permitted (it wasn’t previously). Even so, it is still a marvel to see. You can even go on a twenty-minute tour there and there is currently a plan to completely transform the galleries and reading room.

The second highlight was the Enlightenment Gallery, formerly known as the King’s Library. It once held the British Library’s treasures when it was founded in 1753. Today it holds objects about the Age of Enlightenment, as Rick Steves notes. A display board, when you enter the room, says that it was developed in partnership with the House of Commons Library and the Natural History Museum. The current books on display are being loaned from the House of Commons Library. The aforementioned display notes that those who lent non-book artifacts to the gallery included the British King, the Science Museum in London, King’s College in London, Wellcome Collection, Society of Antiquities of London, Victor and Albert Museum, the Linnean Society of London, and the Royal Asiatic Society (also in London). Of these institutions, most have their own libraries. In fact, the D. Leonard Corgan Library at Kings College, the college’s main library, served as a location in Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code. The building’s exterior appeared in the 2020 film Enola Holmes, a mystery film about Sherlock Holmes’ teenage sister.

The room itself was originally created, in 1823, to house King George II’s library, hence the original name. It was designed by architect Robert Smirke, known for the British Museum’s main facade and block, along with various clubs and houses within London. Of these, the Inner Temple, for which he did some work on, has a library, which continues to operate to this day, as did Bickley Hall. Smike also completed building restoration of the Bodleian Library’s Upper Reading room, which is part of the “old library.” As for the Enlightenment Gallery, it has a Greek Revival design, with neoclassical decoration. It’s said to be in keeping with the “styles of libraries in grand houses all over Britain” at the time, with claims it has echoes of “ancient wisdom and learning.” In 1998, the British Library moved to a new location across from the current St. Pancras station. The latter is not to be confused with pancreas or the Japanese anime film which centers on libraries and librarians, entitled I Want to Eat Your Pancreas. It is far too easy to call it “pancreas” by mistake, a name that almost stuck with me.

This gallery is where thousands of objects can be viewed and serves as an introduction to the British Museum’s collections. Even so, for me, I visited it at the end of my time at the overcrowded museum. I was inspired to visit this room by one particular scene in the December 2011 anime film, K-On! the Movie, a spinoff from the 2009-2010 anime series, K-On!. It features two episodes with libraries, including one about studying in the library and featuring a student librarian at an information desk. In fact, I rewatched this film before my trip to London, just for this scene. During the film, Yui Hirasawa, Ritsu Tainaka, Mio Akiyama, Azusa Nakano, and Tsumugi Kotobuki bop around London, visiting many sites, including walking through the strangely empty Great Court of the British Museum. They make their way into the gallery. During a short scene, Azusa points out that the Rosetta Stone (she put it on their itinerary) is also a replica. In fact, they used a replica in a school play as the death stone for a Romeo & Juliet play, because the fake tombstone they wanted to use had been misplaced.

My photograph on the left on August 3, 2024, of the Rosetta Stone replica in the Enlightenment Gallery, and image of the replica from K-On! the Movie on the right.

The British Museum also has the actual Rosetta Stone in the Egyptian sculpture room, but like Yui, Ritsu, Mio, Azusa, and Tsumugi, I only looked at and touched the replica. The aforementioned gallery likely would have been overcrowded, as the gallery rooms I visited were extremely overcrowded and not suited for visitors. They had inadequate airflow and no overhead fans. As for the film, there were a few other short library scenes in the private all-girls school the protagonists attend, Sakuragaoka High School.

The same day I visited the British Museum, I visited the British Library. It sits across from St. Pancras station, and would be the last library I visited in the U.K. As Rick Steves put it, the British empire built its “greatest monuments out of paper.” The library holds every publication within the U.K. and Northern Ireland, with over 170 million items, such as sacred texts, maps, the Magna Carta, Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook, plays by William Shakespeare, and lyrics of songs by the Beatles. This library, established by an act of Parliament in July 1972 and opened in July 1973, is one of the biggest in the world. It’s only rivaled by the Library of Congress, Russian State Library in Moscow, or Shanghai Library in China. Many such institutions are the legal deposit libraries for their respective countries. Anyone is open to explore the British Library reading rooms and peruse exhibits. You can get a readers registration pass if you are over 18, allowing you to enter the reading rooms.

When I visited, on August 3rd, the reading rooms for humanities, manuscripts, rare books, music, science, maps, and Asian and African studies, were not open. I even saw rooms reserved for the sole purpose of prayer, and went through the “Treasures of the British Library” exhibit in the St. John Ritblat Gallery. It contained many of the artifacts I noted in the previous paragraph. Perhaps because they have the space, the British Library holds the library collections of the British Museum. Rare books fill the middle of the library in a massive climate-controlled column, allowing the upper floors to only be accessed by stairs or elevators, and affecting the structure of each floor. There was also a fascinating collection of foreign currency, stamps, and other postage from former British colonies, called the Philatelic Collection. It could be easily overlooked, but was fun to look through, especially in the way it was displayed.

Like the British museums I visited during my travels, they asked for a donation, but they were free to enter, without payment or restriction. The number of visitors using the study area made clear that they were open to all, in line with library ethical principles, as did the books in their bookshop, some of which would likely be on banned books lists of in U.S. libraries. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk briefly about the university library I visited in Belgium.

© 2025-2026 Burkely Hermann. All rights reserved.

Sources used

#AncientEgypt #archives #ArthurConanDoyle #artifacts #BeatrixPotter #Belgium #BibliophilePrincess #BlackPatrons #BlackPeople #BramStoker #BritishLibrary #BritishMuseum #China #ChinesePatrons #colonialism #communism #electricity #EnolaHolmes #HouseOfCommonsLibrary #JapanesePatrons #JenniferSnoekBrown #KOn #KOnTheMovie #KarlMarx #LibraryOfCongress #libraryStereotypes #libraryTourism #LondonLibrary #MarcusGarvey #MohandasKGandhi #quiet #railroads #reading #ReelLibrarians #restrictions #RickSteves #RosettaStone #royalLibraries #royalty #Russia #RussianStateLibrary #ShanghaiLibrary #SherlockHolmes #SunYatSen #SylviaPankhurst #TheBeatles #TheDaVinciCode #TheIllustriousClient #trains #VirginiaWoolf #WhiteLibrarians #WhiteMen #WhitePatrons

Kerry Mitchell 🍁KerryMitchell
2026-01-19

Even very prolific writers of the 19th century would have written with dip pens until reliable fountain pens became more common. Steel nibs were introduced in the early 1800s. Mass-produced fountain pens from Waterman weren't available until 1884.

Arthur Conan Doyle is said to have written the later Sherlock Holmes stories with a Parker Duofold (introduced 1921). 3/14

Arthur Conan Doyle at his writing desk, writing with a pen. Source: https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php?title=File:1890-1891ca-arthur-conan-doyle-writing-at-desk.jpgThe Parker Duofold “Big Red.” Image shows an uncapped red pen with a gold nib, its box and an advertisement closely cropped. From: https://www.penhero.com/PenGallery/Parker/ParkerDuofoldFlattop.htm
2026-01-15

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

   My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. […] “But the Solar System!” I protested.
   “What the deuce is it to me?” he interrupted impatiently; “you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 2, Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #ignorance #pertinence #science #sherlockholmes #willfulignorance

2026-01-08

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 2 [Holmes], Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #sherlockholmes #brain #facts #memory #mind #organization #retrieval #storage #trivia #information #knowledge

2026-01-06

🔴 On the birthday of Sherlock Holmes, stream the Speckled Band tribute track Three Piper 👉 youtu.be/FPuVJ7bQRpA?si=9VXK26

#sherlockholmes #holmes #arthurconandoyle #newmusic

2026-01-02

A quotation from Arthur Conan Doyle

I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, “Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.” The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British writer and physician
Story (1886-04), “A Study in Scarlet,” Part 1, ch. 2 [Holmes], Beeton’s Christmas Annual, Vol. 28 (1887-11-21)

More about this quote: wist.info/doyle-arthur-conan/8…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #arthurconandoyle #sherlockholmes #holmes #deduction #observation #reasoning #holmesandwatson

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