“The game is afoot” at a NYC Sherlock Holmes exhibit
It wasn’t easy for Glen Miranker to select what to share from his Sherlockian trove when he and his wife, Cathy, created the exhibit, “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects,” now on display at the Grolier Club in New York City.
A former executive at Apple, Miranker has amassed a treasure of Holmesiana – first editions, pirated copies, illustrations, and letters – that today comprises about 8,000 objects.
The exhibit “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects” devotes special attention to Conan Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” and “The Hound of the Baskervilles”—which feature notably different Holmeses.Photograph by Charlie Rubin / Courtesy The Grolier Club
The Grolier Club, a private society for bibliophiles on the Upper East Side, with its marble foyer and dark wood-panelled gallery, would be a fine stage for a nineteenth-century fictional murder, perhaps done in the library with a candlestick, most certainly involving a will.
On January 12th, an exhibit called “Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects” opened there. It features a proper Baker Street-number of items from the collection of Glen S. Miranker, a former executive at Apple, who has been buying all manner of things Holmesian since 1977.
There are a number of Arthur Conan Doyle’s letters; an “idea book” in which he jotted notes for possible future stories; and a never-before-displayed speech, written by hand, in which Conan Doyle talks about why he killed off Holmes. There are also handwritten manuscript pages and a pirated copy of “The Sign of the Four,” which Conan Doyle apparently signed, despite loathing the pirating practice.
Map from the front endpapers of a 1935 edition of Homer’s Odyssey. Photograph: Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PSLclear. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
From efforts to map Odysseus’s journey to Borges’s commentary on map-making in On Exactitude in Science (where the only sufficient map is in fact as large as the territory it depicts), fictions and maps have long maintained a complicated, entwined relationship.
While the right map can uniquely resonate with a literary text, this resonance exists amid an undeniable tension: a concern that the map might demystify or oversimplify a story, at worst imposing a single, reductive viewpoint on something that should be open and unbounded.
A Victorian Valentine. Hindu gods, Aztec rites, Blondie hits … why the heart is our eternal symbol Read more Exploring this tension, while also charting the ways that the relationship between maps and literature has changed through eras and genres, the Huntington’s new exhibit Mapping Fiction brings together literary maps from hundreds of years of literary history. Drawing from the Huntington’s archives of rare literary texts, the exhibition goes back to the early days of modern literature with texts like The Pilgrim’s Progress and Journey to the Center of the Earth (not Jules Verne’s version but rather a 1741 book written by Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg), continuing up to the contemporary era with mappings of Octavia Butler’s life and works and artist David Lilburn’s 2006 mapping of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
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