Normally we don’t cross-pollinate our columns too much here at Sherlock Peoria. Hobbs writes about his doings, Hopkins writes about his, and I stick to my own. But I got a little something in the mail this week that’s well worth writing about, so I’m going to stray into Hobbs’s turf and go “Galactic” for a change.

Anyone who has worked in a field involving software or government documents in the last couple decades has seen the transition to paperless books for those monstrous technical manuals, procedural listings, and other masses of info that needs to exist for reference. No one ever reads such things from cover to cover, and they often don’t go away when their usefulness is done, because they’re still books and thus hard for any sort of bibliophile to throw away. 

Electronic formats have saved us this trauma, as well as the raw weight-lifting workouts of dealing with such tomes by producing what used to be thousands of pages in PDF or HTML formats. Oddly, we still break such paperless books into pages, for indexing purposes, even though one no longer has to flip a physical page. But instead of a big pile of bound physical pages, the whole thing can be stored on a compact CD or DVD, or even just a server somewhere on the internet available for download.

In Sherlockian  circles we don’t have anything that really compares to those function-specific monsters of the book world. The closest we ever came were Ron De Waal’s massive bibliographies, The International Sherlock Holmes and The Universal Sherlock Holmes. They were both huge and function-specific, but a Sherlockian’s fondness for these two works has always put them on a pedestal far above any work-related manual or dictionary of codes or terminologies. Their great weakness, however, was the fact that their source was ever-growing, and that no publisher would ever want to keep up with that growth, given the limited Sherlockian market.

So when my friend Don Hobbs started taking over De Waal’s mission with regard to foreign editions, it was only natural that he gravitate toward the world of e-publishing. He started with Excel spreadsheets and the foreign editions pages you’ll find on this website, getting pictures of all the different books in different languages that held Doyle’s original Sherlock Holmes tales. His documents grew, and his webmaster grew lazy, but Don was undeterred.  He eventually turned to the PDF book.

Thus, the September 2007 edition of The Galactic Sherlock Holmes by Don Hobbs arrived in my mailbox on CD yesterday, and a wonderful thing it is. It’s a book of 512 pages, complete with foreward, held in a single 45 megabyte PDF file, It catalogues Holmes editions in languages you’ve never even heard of, with full color pictures of the books it describes. THOUSANDS of books. Clicking through its pages one gets a breath-taking vision of just how far Sherlock Holmes has spread across our planet in his over a century in print. So many languages, so many strange and often alien visions of Sherlock Holmes decorating their covers. It’s an amazing thing.

As a book, The Galactic Sherlock Holmes, would be an expensive, coffee-table tome, the sort of things only die-hard collectors and Christmas gift buyers would shell out fifty or more bucks for . . . something very few publishers would touch. And yet here it is, produced by a single, dedicated individual. Progress has done us a few great favors of late, and I think this is definitely one of them.

Looking at Don’s achievement, I can’t help but think of what a boon this might be for any Sherlockian collector. Imagine taking a snapshot in time of your collection, with a PDF book containing photos of every item in it along with a listing, descriptions, and personal notes . . . all those stories of what makes certain items so special to you. A collection no longer has to be something that eventually merges into a library’s larger holdings or disseminates into other collectors’ hands. It can be remembered or studied for what it was, long after it no longer exists. In fact, with such a document, a collector centuries from now could even set his sites at rebuilding a collection from our era. (Hobbyists are crazy that way, aren’t they?) The fun never ends.

My congratulations go out to Don on his latest achievement. I don’t know if he’s putting it up for sale, or what his plans are, but be sure to pester him for a copy if you see him. Even if you don’t get one, he’s still Don Hobbs and you’ll get some entertainment out of the attempt.

(Note: The Galactic Sherlock Holmes is available through subscription for $15 a year. Don will burn updated CD in PDF 2 to 3 times a year. Anyone interested can send an email to 221b@verizon.net to subscribe.)

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver