We Have Books, We Have Our Studies

Last week, I was greeted by the best type of mail you can get: books!


I have a looooong Sherlockian scholarship To Be Read list, and when I came across a fellow Sherlockian that was looking to part with some books, I was happy to pick three of them up and cross those titles off of my TBR list.

So, when I unwrapped the package that day, I took the obligatory pic to post on Twitter and then I carried them downstairs to add to my collection of Sherlockian books that I haven't yet read.


There's quite a bit to read.

These three shelves of books, journals and articles are JUST Sherlockiana.  I've got a whole other shelf and a half of other things to read.  (Yes, I have twice as much Sherlockiana as other reading material.  Hi, my name is Rob and I'm an addict.)  Even if I stopped buying books right now, I'd have at least a year's worth of reading material to keep me busy.

So why do I keep buying more books? 

Have you seen the great scholarship out there?  BSI Publishing and Wessex Press alone could keep a Sherlockian well up in books for a long, long time.  And then there are those other smaller or defunct publishers of scholarship: MX's scholarship arm, The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, Magico, the millions of journals that seemed to flow out of Peoria, Illinois...


A common lament among the avid reader is that we will never be able to read even a fraction of all of the good books in the world.  The same could be said for Sherlockian scholarship.  I may never get to own every item on The Shaw 100 (too expensive) or read everything written about Holmes and religion (too numerous), but I'm not going down without a fight.

We can but try.