There was an entire bookcase of books about Sherlock Holmes at Friends of the Library Book Sale at the Superior Public Library. I took home two full shelves.

I am always bittersweet sad when I see what is clearly someone’s collection at a used book sale. Someone curated this collection, decided what to buy, what to weed, what to keep. I am often glad that I can scoop it up, appreciate it for a while, even if it ends up in the same place.

In this post, I want to chat about some of the Sherlockiana that found its way into the Superior Library book sale.

There were several books by Barry Day.

The Barry Day Sherlock books were published by Oberon Books and by Second Opinion Books.  A stack of them were available for scooping, so I scooooooped. Some of these books were not well-reviewed (by admittedly non-Sherlockians), but the author appears to be a cultural/literary force in the United Kingdom.

Barry Day was born in England and received his M.A. from Balliol College, Oxford. Day has written about Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, Johnny Mercer, P. G. Wodehouse, and Rodgers and Hart. He has written and produced plays and musical revues showcasing the work of Noël Coward, the Lunts, Oscar Wilde, and others. Day is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Trustee of the Noël Coward Foundation and was awarded by Queen Elizabeth the Order of the British Empire for services to British culture in the U.S. He lives in New York, London, and Palm Beach.

There were several books by Val Andrews.

Val Andrews is also well-represented among the Sherlockians in the pile at the sale.

Andrews was born in Hove, Sussex, England a few hours after Valentine’s Day, hence his name. Son of an architect, he was introduced to magic by his father. Andrews was a prolific writer on magic, having published over 1000 books and booklets from 1952. He also authored Sherlock Holmes pastiches and Houdini’s novels. He lived for a number of years in Brighton, then in London (from 1943 onwards) where he joined the London Society of Magicians.

I am, alas, a nerd myself for magicians and ventriloquists — especially the closeup magicians, who convince you to listen so very hard to them, to focus so intently.  We should all pay attention to each other the way we pay attention to a person who makes a coin appear from behind our ear.

For as much as fan culture makes one think of nerds on The Big Bang Theory, there is a literary quality to the Holmes fan, such that writing what is essential fan fiction about Holmes is no more suprising than writing a book about Oscar Wilde or being a stage magician.