By JENNIFER HOWARD [Chronicle of Higher Education] – [Timothy J.] Johnson has charge of what he describes as the world’s largest collection of material related to Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The archive includes the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual, which contained the first Holmes story to appear in print (“A Study in Scarlet”); 31 copies still exist worldwide, and Minnesota holds four of them. The collection also features many letters from Doyle to various correspondents as well as original artwork and sketches done by Frederic Dorr Steele, who illustrated Holmes stories for Collier’s Weekly. And it contains the correspondence of John Bennett Shaw, a collector of Sherlockiana with close ties to the organization of Holmes enthusiasts known as the Baker Street Irregulars.
Before being named the Holmes Collections’ curator, Mr. Johnson, 53, was already the Twin Cities campus library’s curator of special collections and rare books, and he continues to oversee those areas. “When you have Holmes and Watson waiting for you and you have all the other stuff besides,” he says, “it’s not too hard to get up in the morning.”
The Holmes Collections officially date back to 1974, when the university bought a private collector’s set of first editions. Mr. Johnson credits E.W. McDiarmid, who had been university librarian, with inspiring the purchase. McDiarmid had been part of a group of Holmes-loving faculty members who began meeting in the late 1940s, calling themselves the Norwegian Explorers of Minnesota.
In 1978 the Minnesota’s Holmes holdings got a big boost when the university received a large collection of rare Holmes and Doyle material from the estate of a doctor at the Mayo Clinic. “That got everybody in the Sherlockian world’s attention,” Mr. Johnson says. “It included a lot of very rare first editions, some original artwork, some manuscript material. That kind of put us on the map in terms of Sherlock Holmes collections.” Subsequent gifts and purchases have continued to expand the collections.
Continued at the Chronicle of Higher Education | More Chronicle & Notices.
