The cool kids table

One of the lovely thing about being a Sherlockian are those moments when you find yourself at the cool kids table. It can happen surprisingly often, depending upon how often you get around, mainly because there are just a lot of cool kids in Sherlockiana.

Today, I found myself at the cool kids table once again, metaphorically speaking, and I loved the group I wound up with so much I almost wanted to buy them t-shirts and engage in team sports against all the other "tables." So many old favorites on this team!

Of course, I can't give you too many details, as I'm not sure if it's time for promoting it yet, but I will say it was because Chris Redmond was sending contributors proof copies of the table of contents for his upcoming collection, Sherlock Holmes Is Like, for us to check. Like his previous collections, About Sixty and About Being A Sherlockian, this book will have its contents divided into particular sections, with particular themes. And it rather makes sense that the topic I was most interested in would fit with similar topics by like-minded individuals.

But of the ten writers in my section, eight were names I instantly recognized. And a goodly share of those eight were folks I'd spent a pleasant evening or some other shared Sherlockian fun with. Enough that I immediately went team-proud, like I said, and wanted to outfit us all in matching t-shirts and start challenging the writers from other sections of the book to wiffle ball. (Yes, wiffle ball is my sport of choice, played "Wacky Races" style with other swingable objects standing in for the bats.)

But this is how Sherlockiana often ties its citizens together . . . investiture "classes," spontaneous social clubs, bands of traveling companions . . . in whatever manner humans can collect themselves, Sherlockians will collect other Sherlockians.

Some Sherlockians even like collecting people more than they like collecting books, as hard as that may be to believe. And now that Chris Redmond has taken to collecting people in books, who knows how meta Sherlockiana is going to get?