“The world is big enough for us,” Sherlock Holmes once remarked, and indeed it is. In fact, it’s probably even too big for us. Collectors of Sherlockiana  know this to be true more than anyone.  Where once I knew dozens and dozens of Sherlockian collectors intent on having it all, now it seems like the best of them have gone specialist, focusing on a single aspect or two of Sherlock Holmes culture while letting the rest of them fall away.

Can you blame them? Once upon a time, it did seem like you could almost have it all. Fellows like Peter Blau and John Bennett Shaw seemed to be making a really good go of it, and Peter’s monthly newsletter, Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press  seemed almost omniscient, being fed from Sherlockian sources all over the world. Sherlockians seemed to be in one great competition to see who could discover  a new item or reference first.

But then the world doubled in size. I’m not talking about the population, though that has made it’s own leaps and bounds. I’m talking about that second layer to reality that we’ve added called “the world wide web.” Once we just had print media (easy to purchase, clip out, or xerox), broadcast (video tape was recording Sherlock Holmes movies and TV from the minute the first Sherlockian got his or her hands on a machine)., and sundry other man-made items from floor mats with caricatures of Holmes to Sherlock teapots (all of which you could physically own).

The internet , however, is unbelievably huge and very tricky to capture.  First, you have to wander some very far-off places just to catch some Sherlock Holmes references, for example, are their any White Ninja  fans in the Sherlockian world?

Take a look at this: http://www.whiteninjacomics.com/comics/crimescene.shtml

It was easy to spot Snoopy dressed up as Sherlock Holmes when  he was syndicated in  newspapers across the country. Web comics are a little different. If a friend doesn’t tell you about them, you’re probably not just going to have them delivered to your doorstep. The job of a true Baker Street Irregular just got a lot harder.

And what of interactive web pages?  My buddy Don has long collected this website by printing out pages. But what  does he do with something like the “Ask Professor Moriarty” page, which runs a simple program to generate random content every time someone tries it? A whole lot of web pages out there never look the same twice, as they’re built fresh by programmed page generators every time you hit them.

Is the omnivorous collector of Sherlock Holmes-related material destined to be a nostalgic figure from the past, like a tide-waiter or a hansom cab driver?  Will future Sherlockians become beings who live Zen-like in the Sherlockian moment, and give up their fondness for material things?

Could be. Of course, it also could be (if one was so crassly inclined to suspect it) that I was just trying to fill up a whole column for this week based on a single reference to White Ninja. You just never know.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver, ASH/BSI