This year’s Adrian Van Sinderen Lecture, which took place on April 20 at Sterling Memorial Library, was delivered by Glen S. Miranker ’75, a longtime bibliophile and former chief technology officer of Apple. Miranker, who has been collecting books, manuscripts, and illustrations related to Sherlock Holmes for nearly 40 years, has one of the preeminent collections of Sherlockiana in the United States. In his lecture, he discussed his passion for book collecting and, in particular, for tracking down the backstories of his books. While Miranker was a childhood fan of Sherlock Holmes, his interest in the fictional detective was rekindled at Yale when a roommate gave him a copy of the Complete Stories to cheer him up during a bout of the blues. Not long afterward, while attending graduate school at MIT, he began collecting Sherlockiana in earnest.
Aside from rare first editions and original manuscripts, Miranker has an extensive collection of pirated editions, which were published without any compensation to the author, Arthur Conan Doyle (copyright laws were only loosely enforced at the time). In fact, he owns a pirated edition of The Sign of the Four that was signed by Conan Doyle himself and addressed to the Chicago businessman and philanthropist Harlow N. Higinbotham. Miranker even discovered that one of his rare editions of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes formerly belonged to Mark Hofmann, a master forger who is now serving a life sentence for murder. Not unlike Sherlock, Miranker is always on the hunt for clues about his books’ previous lives.
The ad for the lecture, which features an illustration from Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
The lecture was followed by the annual dinner for winners of the Adrian Van Sinderen Book Collecting Prizes, which were established in 1957 to encourage undergraduates to collect books, build up libraries of their own, and read for pleasure and learning.
Thank you to everyone who attended the lecture!
Sophomore honorable mention winner Hopewell Rogers at Miranker’s lecture
Sophomore prize winner Jack Taperell with judges Stephen Parks ’61 and Sylvia Van Sinderen
Sophomore second prize winner Simon Horn with judge Joseph Agostini ’93
Senior honorable mention winner Cristóbal Trujillo with judges Miko McGinty ’93 and Sylvia Van Sinderen
Our very long dinner table at Olea, where the dinner was held