I was doubtful when I first heard about this idea, worried that Johnson might be annoyed at the request, but he turned out to be really friendly and enthusiastic about showing us around, even coming into work despite being on vacation for this week. He took us down into the basement archive room that holds the collection.
Things we saw in the archive:
- A bound copy of the 1887 Beeton's Annual, containing A Study in Scarlet, the first Holmes story published.
- A manuscript page, in Conan Doyle's hand, from The Hound of the Baskervilles. He had astonishingly neat and pretty handwriting.
- A few volumes of the stories, reputedly owned by the Czarina Alexandra.
- A collection of photos of actors from various Sherlockian productions, including Leonard Nimoy as Holmes in a 1970s stage production (I was surprised to learn it was with the Royal Shakespeare Company).
- Odd ephemera and trinkets: a set of Russian nesting dolls (from outermost to innermost: Holmes, Watson, Lestrade, Moriarty, and a friendly-looking Hound); an empty ice-cream container featuring a deerstalker-wearing cow; walking sticks; nursery wallpaper. There was an aisle of boxes holding such objects, including marionettes, 2 hand guns, and seemingly endless statues and figurines.
We then strolled through a maze of corridors to another building, where a library conference room contains a re-creation of the sitting room in 221B, assembled from period antiques by a collector. Like this sitting room, many of the holdings have come from the estates of various people with an interest in Sherlock Holmes who donated or willed their collections to the university. It was a wonderful morning for me, and it was a privilege to see even a tiny portion of it.