In my other life at DIYPlanner.com, I produce free templates and forms to help people become more productive or creative. I’ve always had a yearning to make something Holmes-related, though, and seeing we’ll be discussing various stories using the “standard abbreviations,” I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to create my first Sherlockian reference card.

Abbreviation Reference Card

This is a template for producing four double-sided 3×5″ cards that bear the abbreviations (as developed by Jay Finley Christ) for all 60 Holmes stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as the year that each one was first published.

If you’ve never produced something like this before, it’s fairly simple:

  1. Download the version of your choice below, either the black or sepia ink version.
  2. Put some nice unperforated card stock in your printer. I suggest standard white 110lb card stock, the type you generally find at most department and office supply stores.
  3. Open the PDF up in Adobe Acrobat Reader and select “File -> Print…”. If you’re using letter-size stock (as found in North America), you should be good to go. If you’re using A4 stock (as in Europe and elsewhere), tell Acrobat to center and rotate, but not to scale.
  4. Print one copy. Put the paper back into the printer and print a copy on the other side.
  5. Using a guillotine, paper trimmer or scissors, cut along the grey lines to make four cards. Note that many inexpensive printers “slip” a little, so it’s possible that one side may be up to 1/4″ off. If this offset really bothers you, try printing more copies until you get one where slippage is minimal.
  6. You may wish to laminate the cards, round the corners with some scissors, use them as bookmarks, or frame them as a future collectable. ;-)

Downloads:

Note that these are released under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5 License, which says –in a nutshell– that they’re free for personal use, but don’t make a commercial enterprise of them (such as selling them in any way).

Good luck, and if making these sort of things is your cup of tea, you may wish to give the free D*I*Y Planner a try. (Shameless plug, there.)


| See also: Scholarship , Workshop