The Confabulannotated Sherlock Holmes, Chapter 2.1
Featuring the invention of watermarking, county mottos and historic calligraphic peaks
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Previously on my confabulannotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes was snippy
And now, the story continues…
Chapter 2 - The Curse of the Baskervilles
“I have in my pocket a manuscript1,” said Dr. James Mortimer.
“I observed it as you entered the room2,” said Holmes.
“It is an old manuscript.”
“Early eighteenth century, unless it is a forgery3.”
“How can you say that, sir?”
“You have presented an inch or two of it to my examination all the time that you have been talking. It would be a poor expert who could not give the date of a document within a decade or so. You may possibly have read my little monograph upon the subject4. I put that at 1730.”
“The exact date is 17425.” Dr. Mortimer drew it from his breast-pocket. “This family paper was committed to my care by Sir Charles Baskerville, whose sudden and tragic death some three months ago created so much excitement in Devonshire6. I may say that I was his personal friend as well as his medical attendant. He was a strong-minded man, sir, shrewd, practical, and as unimaginative as I am myself7. Yet he took this document very seriously, and his mind was prepared for just such an end as did eventually overtake him.”
Holmes stretched out his hand for the manuscript and flattened it upon his knee8. “You will observe, Watson, the alternative use of the long s9 and the short. It is one of several indications which enabled me to fix the date.”
I looked over his shoulder at the yellow paper and the faded script. At the head was written: “Baskerville Hall,” and below in large, scrawling figures: “1742.”
“It appears to be a statement of some sort.”
“Yes, it is a statement of a certain legend which runs in the Baskerville family10.”
A few decades later, J R R Tolkien was reportedly furious when his publisher revealed to him that he’d inadvertently reused this line in his first draft of The Hobbit. Tolkien begrudgingly rewrote the ‘What has it got in its pocketses?’ scene, thereby ultimately denying the world a possible The Lord of the Manuscripts trilogy.
A go-to lie from Holmes, who over the course of his many mysteries would claim to have ‘observed as you entered the room’ such items as: a quill pen and ink well, a handkerchief, a snuff box, a pocket telescope, a golden coin purse, and, in one startling case, a rabid rhesus monkey.
Forged manuscripts were a rampant problem in the late nineteenth century. This led to the invention of the ‘watermark’, which at that time was literally a jug of water poured over the document, ruining it, but emphatically preventing it from being copied.
A hopeful plea from Holmes, whose self-published monographs (the equivalent of a modern day ‘blog’) had notoriously limited readership.
As astute readers immediately observed, this is, in fact, more than a decade out from Holmes’ estimate. What can we deduce from this? (You know Conan Doyle’s methods. Apply them!)
To this day, Devonshire’s county motto is: ‘We find death exciting!’
Friendly ‘unimagination contests’ were a common pastime of the era, with participants challenging one another to suppress all flashes of creativity or whimsy.
To have flat knees was considered a mark of refinement. “You could press a morning suit on that gentleman’s knees” was a common expression of high praise.
At its historic calligraphic peak, the letter s would often extend to a length of roughly fourteen inches, sometimes reaching over multiple pages. It was only when readers complained about the utter illegibility of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, that the length of the s was finally curtailed.
How does Holmes know this? Answer: he has already skimmed ahead.