On my reread of the Holmes canon, I've finally reached the Casebook stories, so I'm in the home stretch at least. It annoys me, though, that the last short story collection jumbles up the stories; they're no longer in order of the Strand publication dates. They're just random now, and I have to check Klinger's annotations to read them in the proper order.
Speaking of Leslie Klinger, I'm amused that his website calls him the World's First Consulting Sherlockian :) He provides his Table of Major Events online, but note the asterisk! Lots of these events are taken from Baring-Gould's imagination about the biography of Sherlock Holmes. That's fanfic, not data provided in the canon. In the Table he includes dates from real history and Conan Doyle's life too.
I also found an old discussion of Problems of Chronology, and it confirms what I thought, that The Date Being--? book is just a list of dates without justification; if you can't read past theories, then it's basically useless and not worth trying to buy somewhere. There's a list of links on that page, but some are broken, as Sherlockian.net is now just preserved as an archive, and not updated any more.
I'm confused by someone trying to move STUD out of 1881 to 1883. As if Holmes would wait that long to tell Watson his profession or invite him to a case. Watson makes it seem only a matter of weeks or months, not years. I can certainly see the argument that the "Book of Life" conversation doesn't need to take place on the same date as the Jefferson Hope case starts; Watson may have combined the 2 days in poetic license to move the story along. But a difference of years? Wow.
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