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It’s Don Hobbs! A Guest Column by Someone Who Is Not Don Hobbs, But Is Envious of Anyone Whose Whole Name Is Only Two Syllables Long Dear Reader, Don Hobbs came to my little town this afternoon. He stayed but a few hours, and at the end, all the little children ran out into the dusty main street, jumping and waving at him as he rode off into the distant sunset. I know that you may have come to this page to read something about the great detective Sherlock Holmes, but be patient. Don Hobbs is all about Sherlock Holmes, so that subject will soon be coming up. Rest assured. You never know when Don Hobbs will come to your town. He says it has something to do with his job, but you have to wonder. Wherever he goes, he checks in on local Sherlockians and seems to have a vast network of connections as a result. That he learned the hobby in the shadow of the great John Bennett Shaw is easily apparent. A goodly bit of Shaw’s genial nature and humor comes out in Hobbs, and while I would never dare suggest him (or anyone) as the second coming of Shaw, he makes a darn good apostle. But what does Don Hobbs do, you ask? What great purpose does this near-legendary traveller serve as he criss-crosses the country? Is he just photographing highway signs as an eccentric homage to Holmes? Surely that’s too silly to rate him an apostle’s rank. Well, listen up, my friend, and I will tell you. There are many Sherlockians out there, who through disposition or circumstance, don’t travel well. And there a great many of us who do, but don’t do nearly enough. And as much as we might be Sherlockian brain or Sherlockian muscle, Sherlockian heart or Sherlockian hands, Don Hobbs is Sherlockian blood. He moves from place to place and connects Bob Burr to John Farrell. He connects Peter Blau to Nellie Brown. He lets us all know what our distant Sherlockian cousins are up to and why they are such grand folk. People that will never meet or correspond get a social oxygen through Don Hobbs’s conversations over dinner or drinks in a way that newsletters or journals can never do. Instead of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, we have one degree of Don Hobbs. But that isn’t all Don Hobbs is about. Inspired by Shaw, he set about collecting Sherlock Holmes books like many of us did. Yet Don specialized in foreign editions, almost all of which, he isn’t particularly good at reading. Like the highway sign thing, that fact may seem a little silly on the surface, but if you’ve read Don’s columns here you know how far he goes to make the international connections necessary to find each new volume in each new language. While he isn’t headed to every spot on the map, he is still exploring the entire world through books, book-sellers, and other book afficianados worldwide. And as he explores, he’s finding out just how far Sherlock Holmes has made it across the globe and across history. Countries change, disappear, and new countries pop up. And Hobbs looks for Holmes in every place he can reach, making new friends along the way. I think that Sherlock Holmes himself would have found something very valuable in Don Hobbs, had the two been contemporaries. Something that might have even helped him solve a case or two. Don Hobbs came to my little town this afternoon. As a result he didn’t have time to write his column this week. I hope this will suffice. Sincerely, |
