The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes
Read The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Online
Authors: Sherlock Holmes,Don Libey
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Traditional British
Books by Don Libey
A Few Thoughts Before I Go
Avon Lake
Church of the Redeemable Yoohoo
Wound Down Days
Spare
Islands
Religion and Gods
God: Hit or Myth
On Gold
Libey On Customers
Libey On Change:
Marketing Trends and Supercycles
Libey on Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value
Libey and Pickering On RFM
Libey and Pickering on RFM and Beyond
Copyright 1929 by Sherlock Holmes.
Copyright 2012 by Don Libey, Editor.
All rights reserved.
Designed using fonts entirely of Baskerville Old Face
First Edition
ISBN-13: 978-1477479155
ISBN-10: 1477479155
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62110-661-6
Acknowledgement
Great appreciation is extended to Professor Donald Pollock, University at Buffalo (SUNY), the eminent anthropologist, Sherlockian scholar and author, who graciously read the manuscript and offered valued guidance and encouragement to the editor.
Campbell & Lewis Publishers
San Francisco and London
For Andrea
and with memories of my parents,
Weir and Mildred Libey,
who began it all in 1952
with an eight year-old’s
all-time favorite Christmas gift:
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Contents
The circumstances surrounding this remarkable and heretofore unknown autobiography by Sherlock Holmes require careful explanation.
I am an antiquarian: a dealer in rare books and, more specifically, those of four nineteenth century British authors, being Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Kenneth Grahame and, especially, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I live in Sonoma County, California, at Bodega Bay, the enchanting seaside hamlet made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s film
The Birds
. My books are sold almost entirely online at my modest website
www.libeybooks.com
. Also, they are found on the largest online antiquarian network in the world:
www.abebooks.com
. Mine is a small business and attracts little notice, being favored by a few, random collectors and lovers of rare first editions. We bibliophiles exist mostly for enjoying our books, and setting up in business as an antiquarian dealer is simply a justification for purchasing more books.
My education was in English Literature and ancient Japanese and Chinese poetry. A small volume of my collected poetry over thirty-five years was published in 2010, a second collection in 2012, and my first two books of fiction were also published in 2011. Another twelve or so of my books have been published on business topics.
Since childhood, my reading interests have included the four authors mentioned. At age eight, I received
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
for Christmas and spent the next fortnight devouring the book. This year will mark my sixtieth reading of the sacred canon.
My memberships include The International English Honor Society, The Dickens Fellowship, the Thomas Hardy Society, the Kenneth Grahame Society, and the Sherlock Holmes Society of London. I am essentially unknown in all of these prestigious literary societies, but study the scholarship in quiet anonymity with great appreciation for the intellectual insights of others. My particular interests are the first editions and variants of
The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Prior to my antiquarian life, I was an international marketing advisor to the chief executives and boards of directors of numerous U.S. and British corporations and for a number of years lived half-time in England, residing in the Cotswolds and in London. I retired from business in 2010.
Over the more than thirty-five years spent visiting the U.K., I explored all of the great rare bookshops looking for treasures. I met a number of book scouts who unearth valuable first editions for collectors and ship them to their clients all over the world. These individuals attend the book auctions, book fairs, and exhibitions in England, Scotland and Wales, find unrecognized first editions of Dickens and other authors potentially valued at hundreds or thousands of dollars, quietly buy them for maybe the equivalent of fifty or a hundred dollars or so, and re-sell them to their eager customers for one or two hundred dollars. The book scouts are a valuable source of first editions for the antiquarian market and their identities are both coveted and carefully guarded.
One of my sharp-eyed book scouts—I will call him “Ian”—is an expert at finding Arthur Conan Doyle material. He has brought me such books as a first-edition of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
in fine condition that he found in the bottom of a box in a used book stall in Bourton-on-Water and bought for five quid, offered to me for twenty pounds (for which I paid him one hundred pounds), and which I subsequently re-sold to a collector for one thousand dollars, the nominal value being at least fifty percent above that modest retail price. That’s how it works in the old book business. You take care of your scouts and they take care of you.
One year, it may have been 2008, after a long three-month stay in England in my role as the non-executive director of a large British multi-unit corporation, I returned to the U.S. where awaiting me was a slightly scruffy box of books from Ian. As I remember, there was a first edition of Grahame’s
Pagan Days
, several firsts of Doyle’s Professor Challenger books, three firsts by Dickens, and an assortment of ephemera and other oddments he had picked up somewhere. One of the spin-drift pieces was an old holograph manuscript covered by a stained and soiled blue paper wrapper with the title
Montague Notations
written in ink across the front. I put it on a shelf of a bookcase for future research and forgot it for nearly a year.
In 2009, I had a heart-attack and, during the recuperative months following, spent time cataloging and organizing my books. Re-discovering
Montague Notations
, I sat down to explore what this curious blue-wrapper manuscript might contain.
What follows is what I discovered. After reading and re-reading the manuscript, I spent a month reflecting on what to do next. I realized that the manuscript was either a great hoax or one of the most singular literary events of all time. An autobiography of Sherlock Holmes, if authentic, would be equivalent to finding the actual autobiography of Christ, a fictional character given eternal life by devoted but delusional followers. In either case, the believers would be proven true and the nonbelievers proven false. It is a weighty responsibility.
My decision after a month was to quietly ask several eminent Sherlockian scholars for their guidance. By agreement, they shall remain unidentified, but it makes little difference as they were unanimous in their conclusions. After reviewing sample pages, and being provided the provenance of the discovery by Ian, their counsel was straightforward: publish the manuscript as is, including Holmes’s penciled publishing directions, and allow the world’s Holmesians and Sherlockians to decide.
So be it.
Don Libey
Bodega Bay, California
May 28, 2012
Montague Notations
Copyright 1929 by Sherlock Holmes.
All rights reserved by Sherlock Holmes.
To John H. Watson and Mycroft Holmes:
Brothers in Loyalty, Spirit and Intellect.
My old friend and chronicler, John H. Watson, in setting down so many of the adventures we shared over the years, had the remarkable ability to conduct the written flow of events to create sensational interest in the many cases, but only a limited ability to focus the pure light of accuracy on the essential deductive facts.
Since Watson’s death this year, it falls to me to relate some of his masquerades and lapses—intentional and unintentional—made in writing up the various cases over the past nearly fifty-five years of our association and to expand upon my case history.
Having reviewed his published and unpublished accounts from his original notes and manuscripts, preserved in an old tin dispatch box willed to me by Watson and conveyed to me by his lawyers after his funeral, I concluded that a mere
erratum
of our entwined lives and careers would be massively incomplete and, therefore, have set down a true and accurate summary of our experiences within the broader discussion of my unique life and career; in effect, an autobiography.
While many of those who grasp the elegance of pure reason and deduction prefer to keep Watson’s writings
in situ
, others share my obsession for accuracy and intellectual purity. The clearest path to that elegance is to leave the published works of Watson unchanged, but to shine the brilliant illumination of the comparative beacon upon them for all who prefer to possess absolutes rather than the shadows of vagaries.
The cases as described by Watson embody his interpretations constrained by his good and honest emotions, whereas at the center of the work lies my developed intellect and rarified reason within the cold clarity of scientific detachment. The result, after all else has been discarded, is truth. And, as this pure truth was produced by me and brought to bear on so many important events over so many years by my tenacity against the evils of crime, it is my responsibility to those individuals in Great Britain, Europe and the United States who have, in recent years, begun to show interest in the science of criminal detection through their study and analyses of Watson’s writings to provide an accurate factual foundation upon which to limit emotion while resolving problems and combatting the ever-expanding evils of mankind.
To these ends, I have devoted myself this past year. Now, at age seventy-seven, long since retired to my rooms in Montague Street, time has decreased my energies and output, but my routine of five hours of writing a day over sixty-two consecutive days has produced this account of my life and career providing those who have interest with the full and accurate history of the world’s first consulting private detective.
Sherlock Holmes
London, 2 July 1929