Baker Street Byways (Otto Penzler's Sherlock Holmes Library)

Review: One of the books in Otto Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library, a reissue of nine previously hard to find classics from the earlier age of Sherlockiana. This was originally published in 1959.

Holroyd helped establish the Sherlock Holmes Society of London in 1951, the original London Sherlock Holmes Society having been disbanded some years earlier. He was also the first editor of the Society’s Sherlock Holmes Journal, This collection of essays reads as a combination of personal reminiscences and musings about a topic that was certainly dear to his heart.

Where it All Began gives us a picture of how Holroyd came to become a Sherlockian and also states his claim that he provided the genesis for the popular Sherlock Holmes Exhibition of 1951. The Westminster Library has a page dedicated to the Exhibition on Sherlock Holmes.

Two essays discuss Sidney Paget, Frederic Dorr Steele and other illustrators of the Canon. It is easy to forget in this internet age that the average individual did not have access to thousands of pictures and nearly unlimited information with the click of a button. Holroyd helped provide illumination in a darker time.

There is the seemingly obligatory pondering about the actual location of 221B Baker Street, a topic that most Sherlockians never seem to tire of (I exclude myself from this category and skip over such articles). Fanciful Furnishings includes some humorous asides indicating that Holroyd’s wife was less than supportive of his dream to some day construct a version of Holmes’ sitting room within his own establishment. The man who believes that he is king of his own castle should try telling the queen that he is going to build a Victorian-era sitting room, based on a some fictional stories, in the basement.

The final essay, A Baker Street Portrait Gallery, contains character sketches of several persons in the Canon. This is a nice idea and a longer version of the article with speculative wonderings would not be amiss, even today.

Baker Street Byways is a pleasant, lightweight diversion but is perhaps the least of the volumes included in Penzler’s Sherlock Holmes Library, excluding John Kendrick Bangs’ R. Holmes & Company (a terrible book). I believe that Holroyd’s collection is the only such book I have not read more than once and I would classify it as being for completists only.

This is one of two Holroyd books in the Penzler collection, he being editor of Seventeen Steps to 221B: A Sherlockian Collection. As with the other books in the collection, the cover of Baker Street Byways features one of Frederic Dorr Steele’s wonderful color illustrations; this one from The Empty House.

Reviewed by: Bob Byrne, July 2006