Sherlocking In the Spirit of Beijing
By Don Hobbs

For the past fortnight, I have been glued to provinces of the NBC networks, watching the Games of the 29th Olympiad. I have watched sports I never knew existed and ones that I have long been a fan. At the risk of sounding a little voyeuristic, I especially enjoyed Women's Beach Volleyball.  As a collector of foreign translations of the Canon, I also took pleasure at seeing the different countries represented and mentally keeping tabs of whether or not they're any Sherlock Holmes translation from each nation.

As the final medal count is tabulated for this Olympiad, the first dozen countries with the most medals have all published Sherlock Holmes books. The United States leads all nations followed closely by China. Russia, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, Korea, Japan, Italy, France, Ukraine, and the Netherlands have a rich history of publishing the Canon. Jamaica has the thirteenth most medals but I have never seen a translation from this island nation. As a matter of fact there are just 18 countries of the 81-medal winners that have not published any stories from the Canon as far as I know.

Inspired by the 20th Olympiad, I decided to hold my own medal count, using the languages in my own collection as the participants. Languages like Spanish benefited the most in the first Olympiad of the Maniac Collection, because of translations from Spain, Cuba, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile that add to this language's total.  Italian comes in first in my Olympiad with 224 titles. Second place is Spanish with 211 and Japanese follows it closely at an even 200. German with 199 titles was fourth and French was fifth at 131 volumes. Swedish, at 107 titles, rounds out the list of languages with triple digits of titles in my collection.

Danish finished respectfully with 73; Chinese 52; Dutch 51; and Catalan at 50 makes up the top 10 languages in my collection. Russian at 45 is followed by Polish at 41, and then Romanian at 35, Bulgarian at 31 and Turkish at 30 are the next ones on the list. It is easy to see where the international interest in Sherlock Holmes falls. Hebrew and Czech are both at 23 titles. These numbers represent the number of books in my collection and do not reflect the actual of books that have been published in the particular language. We will have to wait another four year to see which language will top my next Sherlockian Olympics.

Happy Collecting!!