A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year With Sherlock Holmes

I’ve greatly enjoyed reading A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year With Sherlock Holmes, one day at a time. It’s an almanac, where every day of the year has one or more entries related to Sherlock Holmes.

Some are capsule biographies of people who’ve played Holmes, or John Watson, or a Moriarty, noted on their birthdays. Or those who were significant to the publishing of the Canon. Some are dates from the Arthur Conan Doyle stories when cases began or important things happened. Or when movies or TV shows debuted. Or historical events or people that are mentioned in or inspired events from the stories.

Learn about fingerprinting! Shorthand! Various of Doyle’s relatives! The artists who illustrated Holmes’ adventures! The performers the characters went to see! Other things Doyle wrote about or did! Key moments in classic fandom! In other words, it’s a wonderful grab bag of you-never-know-what on a certain day.

It was published in 2016, and obviously written somewhat earlier, so the modern items (mostly relating to the TV show) can be a little out of date. But I’d much rather have this as a book than a website. It’s so much fun to flip through and dip into.

The biggest flaw is that there’s no index. At over 300 pages, they may have felt it was long enough. But it would be nice to be able to find out an actor’s birthday, for example, without having to just stumble across the right day.

A Curious Collection of Dates: Through the Year With Sherlock Holmes was published by Gasogene Books and, as far as I can determine, only available through them.