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Cleaning house . . .

Some weeks being a Sherlockian means just tidying up a few things. And, yes, some of that involves actual cleaning. But when it’s Sherlockian cleaning, there’s still some fun to be had.

A few weeks ago, the new binders for The Baker Street Journal arrived, and the box has been sitting in the middle of the library ever since. But those journals weren’t going to get into the binders by themselves, and company is going to be coming soon, so the deed had to be done. And you know how one thing leads to another.

As I started working my way backwards through the journals, putting them into the binders issue by issue, year by year, it was like travelling back through time. A person often gets the feeling that things aren’t quite the same as they used to be, but a rapid progression backwards through one of Sherlockiana’s core publications really shows you how different things are.

Thirty years ago the Journal was the center of things Sherlockian, and every aspect of the life filtered through its pages at a speed of four times a year. These days we’re a little more spread out: The news tidbits come to us from Peter Blau’s Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press more often than the journal. The debates tend to flare and fade on the web lists before anyone ever has time to write a letter to the editor. Even members of the Baker Street Irregulars tend to hear news about their clubs latest production from other sources. But back then . . . ah, reading the Journal was the place to be.

Pardon the "good old days" digression – as time passes, every slight reorganization of your possessions triggers memory lane excursions. And my trips didn’t stop when I was done putting journals in binders. New binders meant new shelf arrangements, and new shelf arrangements meant reorganizing books. Reorganizing books means looking at books and looking at books means reading a passage or two. And one notices, and remembers, a good many things.

The pastiche boom of the seventies is good for a whole shelf or two, and just lining the books back up on the shelf makes one realize that when there was money to be made in the field and less copyright and "character rights" hassles, a lot of good stuff got published along with the bad. Sherlock Holmes was somebody you could read about, and read about, and read about, and that created quite a few Sherlockians in those days. Positive reinforcement. Sherlock Holmes meant a good time, and the good time didn’t end with the sixty stories.

A Sherlockian library can have some very odd little books in it, and most of them reflect a time and sometimes a place in one’s Sherlockian history. There have been entire books published for one Sherlockian event and monographs done by personal friends, obtained from the author in at a social gathering. Sometimes you even find early works by friends you made at a later date, not realizing that they even had early works.

Ah, but eventually one has to stop reading and dust. Or vacuum – no danger of nostalgic distractions there.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver