The old, the young, and the immortal.

 The demographics of Sherlock Holmes fandom have always fascinated me.

One hates to generalize, as there is always one of us that defies any generalization, but there are patterns one sees over time. 

There is something about getting older that seems to bring more interest in things like genealogy, history, and certain aspects of Sherlock Holmes. As we see our own pasts trailing behind us, and we look backwards, we look even further back, since we're looking in that direction anyway. The young look ahead, in wonder and hope. For the old, the look ahead might not be quite as pretty, so it's natural that we like to look back. Yet even in looking back, one has to have future goals.

And there are so many Sherlockian history projects going on out there there days, probably because there's more and more material. And more Sherlockians that actually ARE history at this point, so we can study them as well. But we're not all historians, are we?

There are the creatives out there, who circle Sherlock Holmes in their works like they were a bee tethered to a calabash pipe with a silken thread. Writing stories, making art, hosting events . . . a good event is certainly a creation, isn't it? I tend to believe the creative end of things is where most Sherlockians find their starting point. One wants more Sherlock Holmes and the one method that's available to almost everybody is to write one's own Sherlock Holmes story, and especially since you can get exactly the Sherlock Holmes story you want. And everything you need to know about Sherlock Holmes is in that one sixty-story volume or nine book set. The starter Sherlockian collection, as it were.

Later you can gather more books and follow history. But at the start? A pen and paper, or a keyboard and screen, and you're good to go. I'll always remember being a college kid stuck in a Minnesota fishing cabin with my grandparents for a week and finding a Pinnacle paperback copy of The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes on the spinner rack at a local grocery. Since it contained the one story about Sherlock Holmes's retirement, I realized I had all the research data I needed to craft a post-retirement pastiche, and I did. One book, a pen, and paper, and I was good to go.

There might be trends of certain demographics of Sherlock Holmes fans trending this way or that, but the thing is, there is just so much in Sherlock Holmes that we don't have to settle for any single aspect. One can bounce all over the Sherlockian map for decades, if one gets bored of this part or that. And creating a Sherlock Holmes story set in Victorian times usually takes a little historical research, so the mix of historians and creatives runs deep through the veins of Sherlockiana.

Perhaps that's why the demographics of Sherlockiana are kind of fascinating. There are patterns, yes, but there is a misty lack of clear definition to them that keeps them as questionable as Watson's dates, never to be perfectly delineated. And on the fascination goes.