TLDR: The event was streamed this year and can be watched at the Youtube link down the page!
Each year since 1980, Sherlockians have gathered in November at the Enoch Pratt Central Library in Baltimore for a series of Sherlockian presentations. It was originally called the 'Weekend With Sherlock Holmes' with the first day for Sherlockian presentations, and the second day for a Sherlock film screening and discussion. Over time it evolved into Saturday-only, and that is the current format.
This year the 'Saturday with Sherlock Holmes' returned, the 46th event, organized and hosted by Andy Solberg BSI. Each year a theme is introduced as a guiding principle, and this year it was "Our favorite parts of the canon".
The agenda included Daniel Thomas BSI who has presented at all but one of the 46 meetings held to date! The agenda is shown below:
Agenda
Andy Solberg - Welcome, and My Favorite Passage - A Study in Scarlet
Daniel Thomas - Morley's In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes
Matt Hall - Simon Goodenough's Sherlockian Murder Dossiers
Evelyn Herzog - A Case of Identity to Copper Beeches
S. Brent Morris - The Red Headed League
Deborah Clark - Holmes and Watson: Examples of Friendship
Carla Coupe - The Hound (Especially Chapters 1-2, 6, 12-14
The talks were wonderful. Andy Solberg opened with a delightful set of text from Study in Scarlet. Dan Thomas selected Christopher Morley's In Memoriam: Sherlock Holmes, first published in 1930. Aside from the merits of Morley's column, Morley was a native of Baltimore, and described visiting the Pratt Library in this article to read Doyle:
One walked downtown to the old Enoch Pratt Free Library on Mulberry Street in Baltimore and got out a book-- The Firm Of Girdlestone, or The Captain of the Pole Star, or Beyond The City, or A Duet, or Round The Red Lamp, or The Stark Munro Letters or The Doings of Raffles Haw. For this I specialized chiefly in the lesser known tales, and regret Sir Arthur's tendency (in his autobiography) to make light of some of these yarns. As for The White Company and The Refugees and Micah Clarke and Uncle Bernac, these were household words. When one found at the library a Conan Doyle he had not read, he began it at once on the walk home. It was quite a long trudge from Mulberry Street to the 2000 block on Park Avenue, and the tragedy often was that, loitering like a snail, almost like the locomotion of a slowed moving picture, the book was actually finished by the time one got home. There wall all the journey to do over again the next day.
Dan (a divorce attorney) concluded with a delightful aside on Conan Doyle, and the long wait for his second marriage. Worth listening to! Evy spoke about stories in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Brent Morris explained the fifth proposition of Euclid mentioned in the 'Sign of Four'. Debbie Clark spoke about the friendship between Watson and Holmes through the canon (another area of Morley expertise), and Carla Coupe ended with a beautiful description of the Hound of the Baskervilles (my favorite too!).
My talk was an extension of a blog post I'd written a while ago about my favorite publications of stories in the canon: Simon Goodenough's Sherlock Holmes Murder Dossiers. At some point soon a completed version will be available as an article.
I don't have to give detailed summaries because the Pratt Library streamed the event live, and the Youtube recording is already available!
Timestamps (to allow people to jump to a specific talk)
Andy Solberg Introduction: 0 min
Daniel Thomas: 18 min 05 sec
Matt Hall: 45 min
Evelyn Herzog: 59 min 30 sec
S. Brent Morris: 1 h 13 min 05 sec
Deborah Clark: 1 h 50 min 00 sec
Carla Coupe: 2 h 05 min 45 sec
The end of the presentations are followed by an inquisition, where each speaker asks a question related to their talk.
To round out this record of a wonderful Sherlockian day, here are photographs of the speakers, with thanks to Greg Ruby.
