Sherlocking In North Texas
By Don Hobbs

It was a bumper crop day for Sherlocking in North Texas. Today was the first Sunday of the month and that means it was also the scheduled meeting of the Diogenes Club of Dallas. My travel scheduled allowed me to attend and because of conflicting duties, Jim Webb was not able to be there. He asked me earlier in the week if I would run the meeting and I agreed.

This week's story was The Adventure of the Devil's Foot. I thought long and hard about using one of John Bennett Shaw's quizzes from The Really Ragged Shaw but the last time I used one of them, the rest of the DCD complained for months. Instead, I created a quiz of my own. I made sure each answer was only a single word. The quiz was just hard enough that the winner only answered seven correctly. The winner was Steve Mason and for his efforts, he won a copy of Steve Hockensmith's Holmes On the Range.

We had fifteen Sherlockians show up at The Londoner Pub in Addison, Texas. The Texas heat reached 107 F but inside the pub it was a comfortable 70, although it did heat up during the quiz. Our esteemed Tulsa Sherlockian Dean Clark joined us. Dean is a fellow Whimsical Tour member and makes it down for a few meetings every year. Dean, Joyce, and I had our own Red-Circle meeting at a local pizzeria later in the evening.

In other North Texas Sherlockian news, I have undertaken a massive project in my library. I have a slight dilemma and that is I have run out of shelf space. I do not have the luxury that John Bennett Shaw had of double shelving. I continue to buy books and they have ended up sitting on the shelves on top of other books. I hate the cluttered look, so last week I started taking books off of the shelves. I have been wanting to rearrange the order of book to match their chronological and alphabetical listing in The Galactic Sherlock Holmes and this is exactly what I have started doing.

The beauty of this is I have already found several books that were not listed and a few more that were not in the correct order. Another positive about this entire ordeal is I can now decide how much shelving I will need to add to my library. It is a labor intensive effort to remove a row books, slide over to the computer, scroll down the page deciding which book comes next, and then find it in the massive stacks of book crowding the floors. It has taken me three days to complete four bays of shelves. I still have eight to go!

I guess if I would quit buying books, running out of bookshelves would not be an issue but then I would not be able to say....

Happy Collecting!!