Cleaning Up A Sherlockian Life Spent In Paper

 After having a few Sherlockian friends at the house a while back, I have a very tidy Sherlock Holmes room. Call it a library, call it a study, call it a personal archive, it's the room where this little hobby took up residence from the day we moved into this house. And it took a bit of cleaning to prep for guests.

Cleaning, at this point in our house, typically involves moving things from the location being made to look presentable to a location whose door will be closed to visitors, or basement storage. Which means, when the guests have left, one is left with a room that has a lot of odd things in it, things that don't really fit in with the rest but, for whatever reason, seem like they can't be thrown away or donated to some charity. And so much of those things, at this point, are paper.

Not books. Books fit on shelves. Books are easy.

Letters. Newsletters. Pamphlets. Flyers. Monographs. Quizzes. Presentations that were handed out on paper before or after they were spoken. And every bit of it, about Sherlock Holmes.

The literal paper trail of a life as a Sherlock Holmes fan well spent. History, one might say.

But does all history need to be preserved? When a guy named Tom Simpson wrote a quiz on "The Lion's Mane" for the March 1979 meeting of a Peoria, Illinois scion society and another person who didn't put their name on the quiz paper scored a 72 out of 80 questions . . . does that need to be placed in a library archive and preserved for all eternity? Or even scanned and kept somewhere digitally?

So much of the joy of Sherlockiana is the doing. Concocting a quiz on "The Lion's Mane" is much more fun than taking a quiz on "The Lion's Mane," and future Sherlockians should have that joy. If there was ever only one quiz on "The Lion's Mane" that we kept passing around, in all Sherlockian venues, whenever the tale came up, what a dull place the world would be!

Because here's the hard question about culture, history, and humans that becomes more pertinent in the later years of one's life: Does everything need to be preserved? Sometimes we aren't losing a thing -- we're gaining the opportunity for some future person to do a thing. Because doing that thing is fun. And maybe, without hurting anyone's feelings here, that earlier version of a thing might not have been the best attempt at it. That's life. Each generation replaces the last and takes up a mantle that has been patched, re-sewn, darned, replaced in places, and wears it anew.

 So what do we do with all of the by-products of a Sherlockian life? How much is just waste that needs to be disposed of? How much should be handed off to the next generation?

Tough questions, but ones that must be dealt with.