Treasures of The Sherlock Holmes Collections

We are, we are now in the uh, holy of holies, maybe. The, the inner sanctums of the Sherlock Holmes collection. We're down in the caverns underneath Anderson Library. This is where all of the different archives and special collections, collect materials are stored. But we're in a separate little room that is used to house maybe some of the more valuable collection items and part of that is the Holmes collections. This is, this is definitely one of the treasures from the collection. As you can tell from the title that has been put on this very fancy binding, this is the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes anywhere. This is the Beaton's Christmas annual. This has obviously been rebound in a very nice binding. But inside you can see what the original publication looked like so, here it is. 1887, the Beaton's Christmas annual. The very first time a Sherlock Holmes story appears in print. This is the very, um, first time beyond the Beaton's Christmas annual that the stories really got into popular hands and the popular mind. So, these were the kind of things that people would buy at the train station, at the newsstand. And one of the things that's interesting about the Strand Magazine is that it was highly illustrated. So, one of the first periodicals to really do that. But Doyle was right on top by partnering with the Strand because this was the first time I think a publication like this existed that was illustrated and serialized so he could serialize his longer stories or put a single story in one issue of the Strand and people would wait in line for the next, next issue. This is another piece that probably most people are really interested in seeing. And I love these pages because they have so many stories associated with it. This is an original page from The Hound of the Baskerbills. Probably Doyle's most famous Sherlock Holmes story. What's interesting when you look at this is you can see Doyle wrote the stories without a lot of correction. I think when he was writing The Hound it took somewhere around the order of four to six weeks for him to do this story totally. This is one that has a kind of special, local significance given the fact that Charles Schultz was a Twin Cities kid. And this is an original panel by Schultz. One of a set of thirty that he did for a particular part and this has a Hound of the Baskerbills motif as well. So there's a quote that opens the panel from The Hound of the Baskerbills. Maybe one of the more famous quotes from that story. They were the footprints of a gigantic hound. So there's Charlie Brown and Snoopy and obviously Snoopy's a little affected by the story. [Music plays]