Peschel Press Newsletter for October 2021

Welcome back to another month of news from Chez Peschel. It’s been a calmer month, something we are all grateful for.

The kitties first. Dimitri’s almost ten pounds and is trying hard to throw his weight around, annoying the ladies to no end. He’ll be visiting the vet in November and perhaps he’ll calm down after he’s gelded. He has no idea what’s about to happen to him, poor thing. But it can’t be avoided if I don’t want the house smelling like tom cat spray. I’ve also no idea how big he’ll get and I don’t mean getting fat after he’s neutered. According to that fount of all knowledge, the internet, cats aren’t fully-grown until they’re about 18 months old. Dimitri will be approximately six months in November. Ten pounds. Still growing. He’ll be huge.

Lulu sleeps on our bed when she feels like it. She likes to be petted but only on her terms. She does not like being picked up. She kills toy mice, toy octopi, and catnip bags. Surprisingly, she ignores the laser pointer. Perhaps she thinks it’s beneath her skill set. She’s gotten calmer as she adjusts. A few more months (particularly as it gets colder in the house) and she may warm up to the idea of being a lap kitty.

Sasha is still a skittery kittery; a shy, sleekit, cowering, timorous beastie but not a wee one. She’s chosen to nest in the chair under the card table right behind my desk. She’s close, so close, never far away, and sometimes, if I approach her correctly, she’ll let me scritch her behind the ears. Sasha also routinely gets the zoomies. She’ll dash around the house madly, chasing and being chased by Dimitri. They enjoy squabbling.

Madeline comes out now. She won’t let us near her, but she doesn’t instantly flee if we make eye-contact or she thinks we made eye-contact. She has a strange relationship with Bill. She demands to sit in his lap when he’s in his office at the computer. But if he comes near her any other time? Eeeeeek! Flee! But not too far. She doesn’t instantly vanish under the furniture or bolt down the stairs as she used to. She remains within the room, just further away.

They’re settling in, but it’s clearly going to be an even longer process than I’d originally estimated when we adopted them on Saturday, 31 July 2021. I truly understand why people don’t adopt adult cats. It’s impossible to tell if they’re going to warm up or how long it will take. But we persevere.

Thurber’s Sherlock Stories Are Out

In book news, Bill finally published The Cases of Blue Ploermell! Yes! It’s done! 15,000 words of James Thurber (max) and another 100,000 words from Bill. He went all out, with footnotes galore on the thirteen short stories about Blue Ploermell and his Chinese manservant, Gong Low. Then, there’s the added essays providing a biography of Thurber’s life up to 1923, his early newspaper days, and plenty of background on the Chinese in the United States. Bill also tucked in as much period art as he could cram into the pages. Please note that not all of the art made it into the eBook version because of file-size reasons.

It’s hard to understand today how and why people thought as they did back in 1923. The past is another country, not our own. The past is also far more nuanced and varied than you would think if you based your opinion only on the watered-down pap history you learned in junior high school. The world is complex beyond words. Bill wanted to explain something of why Thurber wrote as he did and I think he succeeded.

I’m so proud of him. Blue Ploermell is done at last!

Finishing Blue Ploermell also means we’re finally done with the 223B Casebook series. Counting Blue Ploermell and The Best of, it runs to ten volumes in all. There’s very little duplication, other than what’s contained within The Best Sherlock Holmes Parodies and Pastiches 1888-1930. Yet that volume, although it does reprint the best stories from the rest of the series, does not include the year-by-year biography of Conan Doyle contained within the decade-by-decade volumes. A few stories from Punch are in the decade-by-decade volumes, as is one of the Blue Ploermell pieces. Otherwise, no duplication. It’s been a labor of love, a huge endeavor, a major piece of Sherlock Holmes scholarly work in the parody area. Bill unearthed all kinds of vintage fan-fiction that hadn’t seen the light of day since they were first published. These stories came from newspapers and magazines throughout the English-speaking world. He even got a few from French newspapers and magazines, translating them for a new audience. Then he dug into all the obscure historical and cultural references, so a modern audience could understand why that forgotten political scandal mattered so much when it was fresh and new.

I’d never paid much attention to Sherlock Holmes before this project. Like most people, I could recognize the iconic image but that was about it. Since this project, I can better understand how Conan Doyle developed the notion of a private detective and then how the world made Sherlock into an archetype. Few characters escape their creators like Sherlock did, becoming more than Conan Doyle ever dreamed possible.

And now we’re done.

The Man in the Brown Suit

We’re moving on to other projects. Bill’s working on finished up The Complete, Annotated Man in the Brown Suit. I hope to announce it in the November newsletter.

We’re Out, Too

We’ve got a genuine public appearance coming up. Saturday, 6 November 2021, we’ll be at the Hershey High School Winter Arts and Crafts Festival. We’ll have all the books and, if all goes well with our print-on-demand order, we’ll debut The Cases of Blue Ploermell. As always, if you visit us at the show and buy a book, we’ll throw in a cloth market bag (which I sew myself) and a cloth bookmark (which I also sew myself). You’ll get our patter, our signature on the books, and a Kiss if you like. This being Hershey, we have to hand out Kisses.

Thanks again for joining us and if you’re in the area, stop by Hershey High School on Saturday, 6 November 2021 and meet us in person. We’re always delighted to chat. And don’t forget to follow us on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/peschel_press/ Feel free to email me with comments or questions too at

Thanks again for reading us because what would we writers do without readers?