The Speakers

Ray Betzner curates the Studies in Starrett blog at www.vincentstarrett.com. A lifelong Sherlockian, he was invested into the BSI as The Agony Column in 1987. Ray is most proud of having edited the 75th anniversary edition of Starrett’s seminal work, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. He is co-editor (with David Morrill) of Dancing to Death, one of the books in the BSI manuscript series, and co-editor (with Tom Horrocks) of A West Wind: American History and the Canon, released by the BSI in 2024. In 2023, he became chair of the Baker Street Irregulars Trust. 

Glen Miranker has been collecting Sherlock Holmes for 45 years. He read the Holmes stories as a kid and returned to them as a Yale undergraduate (BS, 1975), to relieve the stress of a double major in physics and the newly minted discipline of computer science. While a graduate student at MIT (where he earned a master's and PhD in 1977 and 1979, respectively), he began collecting and also forging contacts and friendships in the bibliosphere. He was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars (“The Origin of Tree Worship”) in 1991. His professional career involved founding several start-up companies and then being invited by Steve Jobs to join Next Computer in 1990 and Apple Computer in 1996. He retired as Apple's Chief Technology Officer (Hardware) in 2004 and has pursued publishing and philanthropy in retirement. 

As a teenager, Laura V. Page developed a passion for photography and badgered her parents into gifting her a high-end camera for Christmas.  Decades before digital; the cost of film, printing and slides, plus needing to help with college expenses starting soon at Northwestern University, meant that she needed to get a real job. She landed a fateful one at a small bookstore in suburban Chicago where the manager, Michael Murphy, was a writer and scholar far more than a retailer… and a very close friend of Vincent Starrett’s. Thus began a long and often poignant journey where Laura joined in the personal care for Vincent in his final years and deferentially photographed him often. Years later, along with Bob Mangler, Master of the scion Hounds of the Baskerville, Laura co-spearheaded the Centennial effort to have Starrett’s gravesite in Chicago’s Graceland cemetery finally marked in 1986 with a fitting headstone. Laura designed the monument which includes the words “And it is always 1895.”   . 

Richard trained as a special collections librarian at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Polytechnic library school,  and interned at Waterstones the Bookseller. After meeting his future wife who happened to be American (and a former bookseller) he emigrated to the USA in 2003.

He spent a decade as a bookseller in Chicagoland, and realizing local bookstore history was being lost or ignored started researching and collecting material about old Chicago bookstores. Eventually this led to publishing the Intangible Inclinations blog (www.intangibleinclinations.com).

Having tired of hearing Richard talk non stop about Vincent Starrett for several years, the folks at the Windy City Pulp and Paper convention asked him to contribute an essay about Starrett to their program book (Windy City Pulp Stories 19).

He still won't shut up about Vincent Starrett, or Chicago bookstores.

When not obsessing about Vincent Starrett Richard obsessively follows Legendary British Space Rock band Hawkwind.