ver at the Baker Street Blog (my favourite daily reading), Scott reflects on the growth of this collection, which seems to be an occupational hazard among Sherlockians –myself included, much to the chagrin of my wife– and points to a brief but useful article for beginners over at AbeBooks: Clues on Collecting Sherlock Holmes.

Clues on Collecting Sherlock Holmes
by Phillip Gold, ABAA
221Books, Westlake Village, CA, USA

Phillip Gold, who has selected this issue’s Pick of the Month, shares some elementary tips on how to collect books featuring the famous detective.

Assembling a collection of cornerstone titles will be a challenging, and perhaps a lifelong endeavor. But don’t fail to inject some of your own interests and perspectives into the process. That’s the secret to assembling a unique and significant collection. Books about the world’s first consulting detective, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, have been a consistently popular collecting genre since the appearance of A Scandal in Bohemia in The Strand Magazine in July 1891.

(Via the Baker Street Journal blog.)

Those wanting to find an online version of the famous “Shaw 100″ can find it within the doors of The Diogenes Club, as well as within the social book-cataloguing club LibaryThing.

HIS PARODY IS A REAL ENIGMA. It was originally sent to me a several years ago from a friend who claimed he had heard it on a local radio station in Ohio, many years before. It occasionally winds up in CD-ROM collections of OTR shows, but with little or no attribution except its name, “Sherlock Holmes, 1965″, and the company that apparently produced it, Midnight Productions.

It’s difficult to deduce much about its origins. As as educated guess, I’d certainly say it was an American production –the jarring accents certainly give that away– and it was produced by an amateur-grade production company with decent studio access. The sound is clear, and while the show does have a few funny lines and situations, it’s far from top quality writing or acting. No web searches, ranging from Google to eBay to copyright databases, I’ve done have led me to any further information about the recording, nor the production company, which leads me to believe it is probably defunct. As for dating this, it does appear to be a recording from the sixties or seventies, but most shows produced from the late sixties to the early eighties do have a certain “sound” that is indicative of the equipment and effects common across that time period. Owing to the obvious, most people just assume the production date of this is 1965.

At any rate, this is a rare play that does have an interesting premise (pre- Austin Powers), wherein the very aged Holmes and Watson go searching for a new case in the mid-sixties. The jokes are no funnier nor worse than most other parodies, and so should fit nicely into the library of most Sherlockians who collect such things.

Download: Sherlock Holmes, 1965, by Midnight Productions

If you do know anything more about his recording, I’d love to hear from you.