The View From Sherlock Peoria

There’s A Reason They Call It Ephemera

Recently I was contacted by one of our local Holmes group’s original founders. He was looking for a copy of a chronology of the society that he published in 1987, back when we used real ink-on-paper printing for nearly everything, and print runs had to be well over a hundred to justify the cost. As a result, we had plenty of copies of that chronology booklet for decades. But could I find one now?

Of course not. Other than my single, carefully-filed copy, that wealth of extras had vanished. After years of handing them out to Sherlockians visiting Peoria, taking a few to symposiums, and just generally spreading them around, the supply finally dwindled, and with the publication’s original creator having lost his to basement water damage, no ready replacement was available.

It was an ironic counterpoint to the latest issue of The Serpentine Muse, which appeared mysteriously from the mail pile this week. My ego was filled with delight in seeing my name appearing three or four times in the issue, including an article that I’d forgotten I had written. (You know it’s bad when you look at a title with your name under it and think, “That must be a typo.”) As a young Sherlockian, I would have viewed such a moment as helping nail down my place in history. These days, things like basement water damage remind me of the fleeting nature of such works.

Back in the 1980s, Sherlock Holmes societies were popping up like weeds. And every society had to have a publication (or possibly two – a newsletter and a journal). Very rarely did they see publication figures over two hundred, but they all needed content, and a generation of excited neophyte Sherlockians was happy to provide it. That tide has gone out, however, and what once seemed like great Sherlockian powerhouses, such as Baker Street Miscellanea are barely known to new generations of Sherlockians.

The word “ephemera” suits such things perfectly, with its roots as a medical term for a fever lasting a day. So many Sherlockian items are the product of such a passing fever, and the items themselves have a way of disappearing just as easily. The thought gives one a new appreciation for the collectors among us, as it shows them in their true role: preservers. In their hunting and gathering, they attach value to every little piece of Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and that value gives it a reason to be looked after, cared for, and not resigned to a damp basement death.

Sherlockian collectors of my generation hunted Sherlockian treasures of the forties and fifties, and you have to wonder if future generations will be inspired to hunt up all of those truly rare bits of Sherlock Holmes society ephemera from the seventies and eighties. They’re rare, but perhaps too rare – the sort of thing that’s so hard to find even with eBay that collecting them doesn’t provide an adequate past-time. One has to find something every now and again to make a collecting hobby worthwhile.

These days, we are lucky to have the security of knowing that repositories like the University of Minnesota Collections exist, holding such transitory bits of Sherlockiana in vast vaults designed for such purposes, but still the word “ephemera” itself reminds us to enjoy our little paper pleasures while we can. Nothing lasts forever, even with great underground vaults that look like Indiana Jones should be dropping into them.

So is this a reason to fall into a Ozymandias-type melancholy, all “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”? Not at all. It’s just a part of accepting the big ol’ circle of life, realizing that we should fully enjoy our lives and works while we’re doing them. Kids on the soccer field aren’t scoring goals for the record books. They’re just having fun, and tomorrow, they’ll be out on that field having fun all over again. And that’s what Sherlockiana has always really been about.