Of all the things that author and publisher Jack Tracy might be known for, perhaps my personal favorite is that he had a good standing line for signing his cocaine book.
"In celebration of our own singular addiction," Jack wrote in my copy, as he surely did in many a copy of that book. It's just perfect, and I have never signed a book of my own with anything that matched it. "Our own singular addiction." And lest you mis-interpret that, let me tell you that it wasn't a shared love of cocaine or anything else illegal. It was, of course, Sherlock Holmes.
Entire talks have been given comparing our Sherlockian hobby to an addiction. And we can chuckle at that idea, like one of those funny memes about never owning enough books. (You're not going to re-read every one of them -- move some along to other readers! At some point you're just a hoarder.) But it truly can be an addiction that affects our lives just like a drug addiction.
We get a taste. We like it. We start chasing that high. Our tolerance increases. We start getting disappointed that doses aren't giving us the same high they once did. We spend more money, chasing that high we remember. We get grumpy when dosing still doesn't match what we remember. We switch to a different form of the thing. We switch to yet another similar thing. A few of us go cold turkey, but there are no interventions, no surgeon general's warning, no near-fatal crash that puts us on the straight and narrow.
We ride the highs, we wait out the lows, we stay on the Sherlock train because we know what pleasure it can bring. And all our friends do it, because . . . oh, yeah, that's how we met those friends.
"Our own singular addiction." While Jack Tracy's ghost may not haunt me -- thank goodness -- his words still do. And the addiction, now a lifestyle choice, continues.
Poor me, my copy is unsigned. But it is from 1978, a first edition - was yours later (or) was he just hawking old stock?
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