My Discovery in The Cardboard Box (Part 1)

Please travel back with me to that July trip to St. Louis when I (and many others) attended Holmes on the Heartland. This successful gathering of the faithful had a lot of memorable moments, and on the back of said success, photos and Facebook posts and interviews and such have been prevalent and numerous. Again, kudos to Rob Nunn and those who helped him with it because it really was a thing of beauty to behold. Personally I was thrilled with my purchases and the number of chronologists in attendance. I talked about such in my blog post last month, but I didn't tell you everything. We're going to discuss something else I found that weekend in this and a follow-up entry. So, let's get started.

I apologize for the ruse caused by the title above. What I'm going to tell you about actually did come out of a cardboard box - just not that 'Cardboard Box' (CARD). Toward the end of the conference I became aware of several boxes full of Sherlockian stuff in the hallway outside of the room we were all in that was available to be gone through. I went out and zeroed in on a box no one else had their hands in. Most of it was titles I already had or didn't want or need, but at the bottom of the box were some stapled papers. Three stacks, actually. I grabbed them and held them to my breast like someone was going to try and wrestle them away from me. (I would say I ran away and found a private spot to caress and nuzzle them like Golem or something, but that may or may not be true.) The items were part of the collection of a now-deceased Sherlockian named Bob Ristau who belonged to the scion society The Notorious Canary-Trainers of Madison, WI. (Max Magee brought them. He also is in that group.) Bob's family donated the items so that they could find new homes among our ilk.

The picture above shows the cover of the one we're looking at this time, and it says: "Holmes and Paranoia" by David Hammer delivered (by Mrs. Hammer) at the Sherlock Holmes Workshop of July, 1985 Held in Madison, Wisconsin. I was aware of Mr. Hammer, but not the Workshop. The paper has an old yellowed, but not foxed, coloring, and the text appears to have been typed on a 1980's word processor typewriter as the letters aren't raised or bumpy on the back of the pages. The keys didn't strike the paper very hard, in other words. Regardless, as I flipped through it I came to page 5 and saw dates for canonical cases. I saw the word 'chronology'. I saw the word 'analysis'. The next thing I remember was being brought back around by a mustachioed doctor giving me brandy from a Gladstone bag. I wasn't sure what I had in my hands, but I was in. And distracted.

The paper is about whether or not Holmes was paranoid, and how he may have simply made up Moriarty in his mind as a result of that paranoia. It heavily quotes an Encyclopedia Britannica article from 1966 called 'Paranoid Reactions'. It also talks about a paper called 'The Truth about Professor Moriarty' by one A. G. Macdonell (written for a publication titled The Incunabular Sherlock Holmes - published by the BSI in 1958.) That paper examined the string of failures Holmes had between 1887 and 1891, and what lead to his mental health deteriorating to the point of said paranoia. Hammer points out that "Macdonell does not adopt the Zeisler Chronology, which possesses an authority of its own." He (Hammer) notes that Macdonell skips some cases which were actually successes, and goes on to list all of the cases Zeisler place between '87 and '91 and rate them as failures or successes. He then lists what Holmes did or did not accomplish in those cases. Hammer draws heavily on Holmes's own words in showing that his (Holmes) delusions were being hinted at all along. He also mentions that the tall man pushing his way through the crowd at the train in LAST was just a regular dude trying to catch a train, but Holmes believed it was his imaginary arch enemy. (Or he was trying to convince Watson it was.)

As a chronologist this is exactly the kind of gold I hope to mine out of old boxes and the like. It offers nothing new to the chronolgical lists I have in my database, but it does represent another moment in the history of Sherlockian chronology...and that's just as important. I love having it, and I loved reading it. The cover page is handwritten, and not a copy. Using a flashlight and my fingertips, I clearly made out where you can see and feel the raised lettering on the back of the sheet (unlike the typed ones). In the upper right hand corner is the abbreviated word 'orig.' written lightly in pencil in what could...COULD...be the same hand. The other corner has a horizontal staple, and under it runs the vertical rusted mark of an old one which has been removed at some point (probably to make copies). On the back where the ends of the new staple meet you can see an almost unbroken like of rust where the old staple came together. It was obviously a longer one that the current one whose ends are quite far apart.

There's a little mystery here, though. On each page of the text, in the exact same spot, are little black marks. These are very likely from a copier, and were on the screen/glass of it and transferred to each page. I think this IS a copy, not the original. Now, the first page could be original, but I don't believe the rest of it is. This also raises the possibility that this wasn't produced on a word processor typewriter but a standard one, and explains why there's no back-of-the-page bumps. Again, regardless, it's a great find, and on that I am very happy to add to my collection.

I am just a sucker for a box full of free books, and what happened here is exactly why. I never know what's going to be in one, and I'm always very happy to go mining. Next month I'll be back to talk about the other finds, and I do hope you'll join me to see for yourself. Thank you for getting this far again. I'll see you soon, and as always...thanks for reading.