Book Release: Femme Friday
We are incredibly happy and proud to be able to announce the publication of our essay collection:
What started as an act of resistance – a weekly post on Fridays on our tumblr to celebrate – rather than mock and put down – women became something we greatly enjoyed doing, and so it grew into a series. This volume is a collection of these essays on the women in the Sherlock Holmes stories as well as in adaptations and pastiches. We tried to include as many ladies as possible, though we are aware that we missed the likes of Mrs. Cushing from “The Cardboard Box,” Nancy Barclay from “The Crooked Man,” Emilia Lucca from “The Red Circle” as well as the ladies from “The Greek Interpreter” and “The Retired Colourman”, and a few others. However, we have assembled quite the collection of essays on awesome ladies, so we beg forgiveness from the fantastic ladies we did not manage to include.
Once the idea to publish the essays in a book started to form, we opened a call for further essays on our social media sites – which resulted in the 33 essays in this collection.
Trying to figure out how to best navigate formatting and figuring out the quirks of self-publishing was a steep learning curve – and it continues – as we are working on an epub version of the content. In the end, we decided to publish with two different companies, as shipping costs would always be horrendous for one continent or another. We are now selling the book on Blurb.com (US market) and Lulu.com (European market).* Since the books have several gorgeous images by Merilyn Paugus, we wanted to honour her work as well, so we created both an affordable black and white version of the book, and a slightly more fancy one with colour images.
You can find the US versions here, and the European versions here. They are only very slightly different in format, and Lulu allowed for a title on the spine, whereas Blurb did not, but essentially they are the same. Within a couple of weeks, the book should also be available via Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
All proceeds of the sales are used to cover the maintainance costs of our website and podcast hosting sites.
We would like to thank every one of those amazing ladies who offered to contribute to this project. Femme Friday resonated with a lot of people and this collection is very important to us as Sherlockians, and as women.
Maria
*We dearly hope that shipping to Africa, South America, Asia and Australia won’t be too expensive!
Maria teaches English Literature at Leipzig University, Germany, published a German introduction to Sherlock Holmes and is a fan of all things Holmes – but especially of the Canon stories and Sherlock BBC. Contact her at @stuffasdreams
Thanks for including me, and thanks for all the work and energy (and productions costs) you’ve invested in this project!
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