A little time travel from crumbling newsprint

 The newsprint will all be gone one day. I think that's what makes it all the more delightful to discover a hunk of it in an old book -- well, if the acid hasn't stained the pages, I guess, if you're a collector. One of the little, everyday hallmarks of Sherlock Holmes's popularity is forever demonstrated in that people enjoyed him so much that they'd clip newspaper articles about him out of the paper and put them in their copy of the stories. One such fellow was Ronald Holloway of Lincoln, Illinois.

Mr Holloway bought, or was given, the attractive eight volume set of  the Coller complete, authorized Canon printed in 1936, and signed his name to each volume.

I was lucky enough to pick this set up in an antique mall on my way to St. Louis one weekend, on a Sherlockian outing to visit friends there. But since I have a few copies of the Canon, to say the least, I don't know if I ever opened them up . . . until this evening. And out fell an Associated Press article from 1937, which Mr. Holloway had tucked away in the first volume.

I'll let you read the whole thing, if you enlarge the pictures. It's a nice article to celebrate fifty years since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, and I love the opening:

    "The fiftieth birthday anniversary of one of the best known men of modern times will be celebrated this year. 
    "Curiously, there have been no memorials to him in existence; he has never been honored by a learned society; there is some doubt as to whether he is alive today. Nevertheless, his name is a household word throughout the world. His features are as familiar as the Statue of Liberty.
    "That man is Sherlock Holmes.

    "Actually, his is more than 50. If, as some contend, he still is tending his bees in Sussex or pondering some exotic problem in his lodgings at 221-B Baker street, London, he must be in his middle eighties at least."

On April 25, 1837, a writer in New York got an article on the national wire service that did not mention Sherlock Holmes being a fictional character until the fifth paragraph. Conan Doyle is quickly mentioned, but so is Frederick Dorr Steele, Gray Chandler Briggs of St. Louis, and Vincent Starrett. The Beeton's Christmas Annual with Holmes is already seen as "one of the rarest books of modern times" -- in 1937. Frederick Dorr Steele even admits he never liked any detectives except for Sherlock.

And if you flip the article over, you get the center of a large advertisement on the healthy benefits of smoking Old Golds cigarettes -- which is amusing when Watson was advising Holmes as to the dangers of smoking many decades before.

I folded the crumbling article carefully around an acid-free cardboard and slid it into a comic book back to slow its aging. But it will be dust one day, as such things turn to. And as newspapers slowly disappear with the procession of e-generations, we will likely not see such clippings tucked in books again. But for the moment, they are a lovely gift from the past, giving us a glimpse of a time and an attitude toward Sherlock Holmes that was a little different from our own.

So I'll tip my deerstalker to Ronald Holloway of Lincoln, Illinois, who was a Sherlockian for at least long enough to clip out an article about our mutual hero and slip it into that book. Thank you, sir.