Here’s a mystery: Why is the largest Sherlock Holmes collection in the world—everything from rare first editions of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories to one-of-a-kind vinyl recordings of the 1930 radio plays to weird needlepoint images of the fictional Victorian-era detective in his famous deerstalker hat—buried three stories underground at the University of Minnesota’s Andersen Library?
To librarian Tim Johnson, whose full title is the E. W. McDiarmid curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the Andersen Library, the answer is elementary. Although Johnson, who’s obviously the cool librarian with his white goatee and earring, doesn’t actually drop an “elementary” on me; he explains why 60,000 pieces of Holmes stuff—from which most of the touring show Sherlock Holmes: The Exhibition opening this month at the Minnesota History Center (345 Kellogg Blvd. W., St. Paul) is drawn—are kept in one of the Andersen’s underground caverns.
“The advantage of being underground is you don’t get the seasonal transitions,” he says of the environment, which is calibrated to precisely 63 degrees and 45 percent relative humidity year-round. “It’s the wild fluctuations, from fall to winter and from winter to spring, that damage the books.”
OK, sure, but why Minnesota? It’s far and away the U’s sexiest special collection, the collection that’s spurred the university’s ability to administer the development of more and more world-class special collections at the Andersen. The answer, it turns out, involves a shadowy Sherlockian society based in New York, plaques fastened on mountains high up in the Swiss Alps, Nobel Prize–winning rheumatologists down at the Mayo Clinic, and former WCCO anchor Don Shelby’s ability to pass an impromptu quiz of Holmes trivia.
Johnson explains that the first official acquisition of the Holmes Collections, a small cache of first-edition books and periodicals, was made back in 1974.
“But you have to go back to 1948,” he says, to a now legendary lunch of five faculty members, all deans or department heads, all deep Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, at Coffman Union’s Campus Club.
In fact, you really have to go back even further, Johnson says, to a private group of Holmes enthusiasts called The Baker Street Irregulars, one of the first and most exclusive groups of fanboys, created in New York in 1934. Holmes fanatics seem to draw from a more elite pool of nerdom than mere Trekkies or Marvel geeks, and the Irregulars exemplify this: doctors and lawyers and professors and publishing executives drawn in by Conan Doyle’s excursions into Victorian-era sci-fi inquiry, new-to-the-era fields of toxicology and ballistics that helped Holmes solve his cases.
The group still exists today. In fact, a year ago, Johnson himself became a member. He was given the title “Theophilus Johnson,” an obscure reference from The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Minnesota branch was chartered at the 1948 Campus Club lunch. Members included E. W. McDiarmid, the former university librarian, and the distinguished professor of Norwegian history Theodore Blegen, whose name is now emblazoned on Blegen Hall.
And it was an offshoot of that original U of M Irregulars subgroup that convinced the widow of the Mayo Clinic’s Dr. Philip Hench, the winner of the Nobel Prize in 1950 for his discovery of cortisone, to part with her husband’s incredible collection of Holmes literary ephemera. Hench was such a Holmes enthusiast that he had traveled to Meiringen in Switzerland to convince the Swiss government to install a plaque near Reichenbach Falls, where the evil Professor Moriarty had (spoiler alert!) disposed of Holmes (temporarily) in 1893’s “The Final Problem.”
“It’s the acquisition of Hench’s collection in 1978 that gets Sherlockian collectors to start saying, ‘Hmm, what’s going on in Minneapolis at the U?’” Johnson says. Hench’s small but extremely valuable collection included, among other ultra-rarities, copies of Beeton’s Christmas Annual that contained A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock’s first adventure—and of which only 34 copies remain in the world. Hench had four.
The next domino was landing eccentric Santa Fe collector John Bennett Shaw’s massive Holmes collection. Unlike Hench, Shaw was a Holmes completist—rare posters, license plates, street signs. After the U landed Shaw’s stash in the ’90s, the floodgates opened.
It was at Shaw’s behest that an elderly McDiarmid and Don Shelby, himself a Holmes enthusiast, were sent to convince Edith Meiser, the writer of all the Holmes radio dramas from the 1930s and 1940s, to part with her collection.
“So, the story goes, she quizzed them rather mercilessly about how well they knew the Sherlockian canon,” Johnson says. “Apparently, they passed.”
As Johnson and I wander around the Raiders of the Lost Ark–style stacks in another subbasement, we pass row after row of all the other important stuff housed in the Andersen: the largest children’s book collection in the world, the archives of the Guthrie and the Penumbra, the James Wright papers, a box of 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets. But the Holmes material is still growing with decades of itemizing and cataloging spilling into the hall.
“We still have archiving to do,” he says. “I call it job security.”