1. Friday I wanted canon Holmes to read and the bookstores didn't have The Sign of Four, so I went to the library. There are 620-something returns for The Sign of Four in the catalogue. 48 of those are circulating, which means 580-some are not. Nor are the circulating books all The Sign of Four. Most are translations, some are commentaries. Pfft.

But I wanted canon Holmes to read, in a dead-tree format, so I picked up A Study in Scarlet from BMV. The Oxford Classic Study in Scarlet. I should have looked inside first, but I didn't, and so found myself assailed by asterisks on every page. Oxford Classics are footnoted, which is bad enough, but not footnoted with numbers, which is worse. It's as bad as the King James Bible I bought ages back that has all the names divided phonetically and everything Christ said printed in red. That's the definition of unreadable right there.

2. (I seem to be doing this a lot lately.) I wanted a map, a London map, and I looked for a London map 'most everywhere. I went to Book City, indy Book City, but they didn't have London maps anywhere there. Nor BMV nor Seekers, not that I'd expect used bookstores to sell maps. But Book City did, in happier days, and I am disappoint, as they say.

So I went to Indigo, the evil empire-- quite as evil as amazon and for similar reasons. They had maps, and Peter Ackroyd's The Thames: Sacred River for a hideous price, though it's a hideous price anywhere. But Indigo is visually confusing at the best of times (laid out like an Escher drawing with half-floors and curving staircases, I think to induce mind-fuzz and promote impulse buying) and was crowded with yuppies and their yuppie-stroller-tanks, and my glasses weren't handy to see how or even if Ackroyd deals with the lost rivers of London. Bought my map and left post-haste.

Map turns out to defeat even my reading glasses. Shall take a magnifying glass to it. But really, London needs something like the Tokyo Metropolitan Atlas with detailed maps of each borough or whatever they're called.

3. Reading The Adventure of the Final Problem makes the premise of The Seven Per Cent Solution look entirely convincing.

4. Aaronovich gives a preview of his next book, Whispers Underground at his blog on Jan 10. (Why I prefer LJ-- easier to link to entries.) It's not out till June. For the first time in a long time I want something-in-English **now**. Also his list of best-selling UK fantasy looks much more interesting than USA fantasy I-wonder-why.

5. I really should paint the black piano keys of my stairs. The priming gets grubby from my shoes. But I can't face the taping and all, and the ten pounds I've put on since September dislikes the idea of having to skip stairs going up and down. Should just do the gloss white and forget about it.