Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle, 1887-1927)
From Commonplace Book
Contents
Stories
"The Adventure of the Three Gables"
- Holmes asks Mrs Maberley, "You don’t happen to have a Raphael or a first folio Shakespeare without knowing it?”
"The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez"
- Objects which resist commodification because of their inbrication in history, historical print cultures: manuscripts, pen knives (mass produced?)
- Narrative logic of newspaper advertisements, of consumer capitalism: rare ms sold, opticians
- "When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin--an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from the French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of opinion that none of them unites so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but..."
- "It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November. Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens deciphering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery."
- "It is trying work for the eyes. So far as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey’s accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century[.]"
- "It was one of those small sealing-wax knives to be found on old-fashioned writing-tables, with an ivory handle and a stiff blade."
