Christopher Morley studio reopened.

Christopher Morley, left, w/publisher Mitchell 
Kennerley, ca. 1930. Genthe photograph collection, 
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

As the Roslyn (NY) School District noted, the Christopher Morley Knothole (the small studio of author and Baker Street Irregulars nurturer Christopher Morley, 1890–1957) was reopened on June 9. Located within Christopher Morley Park in Roslyn, the studio includes a bathroom designed by famed inventor and Morley friend Buckminster Fuller and hosts educational programs.

More on the Knothole:

•  Christopher Morley Knothole Assn

• "Christopher Morley: Life in Roslyn" from the Bryant Library (Roslyn), which includes images of the Knothole

•  Roslyn Landmark Society

• Articles by the Long Island Press 

Newly digitized Baker Street Four-Wheeler.

Christopher Morley. Library of
Congress, Prints & Photos Div.

The Houghton Library blog at Harvard brings word of its digitization of A Baker Street Four-Wheeler: Sixteen Pieces of Sherlockiana (1944, ed. Edgar W. Smith), which features goodies such as "Sonnet to Sherlock" by author-critic Anthony Boucher and "Sherlock Holmes's Prayer" by BSI founder Christopher Morley. "Strengthen me," writes Morley as Holmes, "not to astonish the good Watson merely for theatrical pleasure." Although this work lists "The Man Who Was Wanted" as a tale penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, it was not; go here for an explanation of its history.

A new use for the SH canon.

Christopher Morley. Library
of Congress, Prints and
Photographs Div.

Harvard's Houghton Library features an amusing 1944 letter from Baker Street Irregulars cofounder Christopher Morley, who sought guidance from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (part of the "Sacred Writings") as a prospective father of the bride. He also mentions colleague Vincent Starrett in a handwritten note.

Of related interest: a TLS round-up of recent SH-related works such as Michael Dirda's On Conan Doyle and Anthony Horowitz's House of Silk.

Sign in, please.

Vincent Starrett, NYPL

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center shows the signatures of notable visitors to Frank Shay's Bookshop in New York; they signed the door to the bookshop from 1920 to 1925. Among those of interest to mystery fans: Theodore Dreiser, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Christopher Morley, and Vincent Starrett.

Neglected Books on Christopher Morley.

Christopher Morley
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Div.

The Neglected Books blog discusses Christopher Morley's Human Being (1932). Morley, instrumental in the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars, is best known for Kitty Foyle (1939), but I've enjoyed his novels featuring a bookseller, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), as well as his essays (collected in various volumes such as Pipefuls, 1920) and his sense of humor (such as his spoof of Henry James).

"We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. . . . [T]here was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. . . . [T]he detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen up the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned."—Christopher Morley, "The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby," Tales from a Rolltop Desk (1921).

Exhibition: M. P. Shiel, Christopher Morley, etc.

Roberts 1895 edition of
M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski.
Providence Atheneum.

The University of Delaware exhibition "London Bound: American Writers in Britain, 1870–1916" includes M. P. Shiel (author of the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone work Prince Zaleski, 1895, and friend of Arthur Machen); Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley; and Stephen Crane's "The Ghost," to which authors such as Henry James, H. Rider Haggard, and A. E. W. Mason (the latter the author of At the Villa Rose, 1910) contributed. The exhibition is on display until Dec. 17.

Not much mystery action at June 23rd Bloomsbury auction.

The June 23rd Bloomsbury auction that received press for the lack of interest in some of the Steinbeck items also displayed tepid attention to the mystery-related offerings:

• James Grady signed works, including books from the Condor series (Six Days of the Condor, etc.): Unsold.

• M. R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary: Unsold.

• Ross Macdonald, The Far Side of the Dollar, $300 (valued bet. $1000 and $1500); Sleeping Beauty, $150 (valued bet. $500 and $700) ; proof of The Instant Enemy, with "Boucher" written and circled in red pencil (probably critic-writer Anthony Boucher), $150; Self-Portrait, signed by Macdonald and Eudora Welty, $150.

• Horace McCoy, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Copy owned by John Dos Passos, valued bet. $1200 and $1800: Unsold.

• Mary Roberts Rinehart, signed card: Unsold.

There was also a completely delightful inscribed copy of Christopher Morley's I Know a Secret for Dorothy Parker, in which Morley drew pixies (valued bet. $1200–1800, unsold).

Happy birthday, Christopher Morley.

Baker Street Irregulars founder, critic, writer, poet, and all-around bookman Christopher Morley was born today in Haverford, PA, in 1890. He died in 1957. Among his many notable works are Parnassus on Wheels (1917), The Haunted Bookshop (1919), and Kitty Foyle (1940). I particularly adore his spoof of Henry James (published in Travels in Philadelphia, 1920).

About the image: Christopher Morley. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Information, Please with Mystery.

Otr.net offers various episodes of Information, Please (moderated by Clifton Fadiman) with Basil Rathbone (September 27, 1938), Rex Stout (March 28, 1939), Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley (September 18, 1942; October 30, 1942; June 21, 1943), and Alfred Hitchcock (January 22, 1943). Go here to listen (need Real Player).

(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos)

Christopher Morley spoofs Henry James.

"Thorncliff was thinking, as he crossed the, to him, intolerably interwoven confusion of Market Street, that he had never--unless it was once in a dream which he strangely associated in memory with an overplus of antipasto--never consciously, that is, threaded his way through so baffling a predicament of traffic, and it was not until halted, somewhat summarily, though yet kindly, by a blue arm which he after some scrutiny assessed as belonging to a traffic patrolman, that he bethought himself sufficiently to inquire, in a manner a little breathless still, though understood at once by the kindly envoy of order as the natural mood of one inextricably tangled in mind and not yet wholly untangled in body, but still intact when the propulsive energy of the motortruck has been, by a rapid shift of gears and actuating machinery, transformed to a rearward movement, where he might be and how."

-- Christopher Morley, "Market Street, as Certain Eminent Travelers Might Have Described It," Travels in Philadelphia (1921), 125-26. Photos: Christopher Morley (top) and Henry James, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division