As fall comes in and we begin the easy slide into the old home turf of Christmas-time, one can’t help but get a little nostalgic for autumns past. And since  I’ve been scanning and cleaning up old monthly columns that I wrote for Plugs and Dottles to put on the web site,  it is hard not to recollect that it’s coming up on a full decade since those happy days . Yes, once I only had to write a new little essay once a month instead of once a week . . . and it shows.

For those of you who don’t remember that particular incarnation of a newsletter called Plugs & Dottles (The Nashville Scholars have the current holder of that name.),  it was an eight-page monthly out of Peoria, published by my neighbor, Bob Burr. Never late, painstakingly combed for  typos and grammatical errors,  Plugs & Dottles was so much more than just a local scion society newsletter.

Before the internet,  a monthly newsletter  like P & D was an important information hub. News, letters,  humor . . . heck, we even had flame wars before we knew what  flame wars were.  It served an important purpose in connecting Sherlockians, and without the internet, I actually think Plugs & Dottles might still be with us, in one form or another.

While I can’t say how the changes of the last ten years have affected anyone else,  it’s easy to see how they’ve affected my own output.  Back in the Plugs & Dottles days,  I was writing for my friend Bob and his readers.  Now it always seems I’m just writing for the Sunday night deadline, which too often winds up sliding from the general description of essay to basic blogging. Take this week’s offering for example . . . .

If you consider the world of Sherlock Holmes, with its letters, telegrams,  commonplace books, and bundles of case notes – that paper world was still with us until the end of the last century.  Sherlockians always had paper in common with their hero and his biographer.  But all that has changed.  The paperless office is the goal of many a workplace. Amazon is attempting to get one more electronic reader off the ground.  And the first resource for any research is now the Google search, whether you’re trying to find out about a person, place, or thing.

In the ten years since we saw the end of Plugs & Dottles, our world has undergone a paradigm shift that we’re all still adapting to.  Even with e-groups like Welcome Holmes or the Hounds of the Internet,  with websites like sherlockian.net ,  we still haven’t seen a web equivalent of something as simple as that one Peoria newsletter.  We’ve seen content.  We’ve seen podcasts,  blogs, and PDF newsletters.  But I still think there’s something left for Sherlockians to pull off in this new medium.  Something that takes  more people than a single webmaster and more organization than a willy-nilly posting group.  We have yet to see our Baker Street Journal of this new medium.

But for now, the Sunday night deadline is upon me and I have to end this latest bloggish ramble. 

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver