This morning I discovered a time bomb left by someone in my household forty years ago.
It was a large scrapbook in which they had inserted Sherlock Holmes related clippings and paper paraphernalia between the pages, plainly intending to paste them in eventually.
Here's a sample . . .
The full stack is almost an inch deep.
Deerstalkers abound, amid actual articles about Sherlockians, headlines that sound like they're about Sherlock or Watson but are really about boxer Larry Holmes or golfer Tom Watson, and a dozen other related topics. Want to improve your child's reading by using a TRS-80 Color Computer? There's a $14.95 program on a tape cassette to help them through The Hound of the Baskervilles! All those things that today we would share a link or a pic on social media to amuse our Sherlockian friends, all clipped and collected -- things that many a mailed-out newsletter would pass along as well.
A few bits, like a tiny John Bennett Shaw news clipping, evoke memories of events. Others, like the program for a Hound of the Baskervilles play that I know we saw in Chillicothe, Illinois, are long forgotten. How an AP newswire printout on Conan Doyle's self-experimentation with something called gelsemium made it into our hands, I have no idea, other than all the friends I had in the newspaper industry back then. (That was about Alvin Rodin and Jack Key publishing an article in the Journal of American Medicine, by the way, if you want to to down that rabbit hole.)
The schedule for "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" on WCBU public radio, starting with a three part adaptation of A Study in Scarlet. A TV Guide clipping about Peter Lawford as Sherlock Holmes and Mel Ferrer as Professor Moriarty soon to appear on Fantasy Island. The Ballymote Tape Library, out of Bayshore, New York, offering "Buy any 4, get 1 FREE!" tape cassettes of Rathbone/Bruce and Gielgud/Richardson radio shows. It's a veritable time capsule of Sherlock Holmes's influence and reach on the 1980s.
A 1985 Hardee's Huckleberry Hound Action Meal box, with Funslide(TM!) Card? That's in there two. We're much less concerned with random characters wearing deerstalkers in 2025, with a wealth of Sherlock Holmes related content available at the ease of a Google search, but in 1985, seeing Huckleberry Hound dress up like Sherlock Holmes was a moment worth noting. It was a different world.
I was doing some serious cleaning when I stumbled across this view of the past and am going to have to force myself to walk away from it for now just to keep at my task -- a busy Saturday ahead! But I had to stop and share a little bit before moving on.
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