"My Collection of M's is a Fine One"

 

"My collection of M's is a fine one," said he.

 

"My collection of M's is a fine one," said he.  "Moriarty himself is enough to make any letter illustrious, and here is Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory, and Mathews, who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross, and, finally, here is our friend of to-night."

 Sherlock Holmes mulling over his M book always comes to my mind when I briefly consider cleaning out my Dropbox folder of Holmesian files. As I share a Dropbox with my better half, my folders begin with M, including the biggest folder in my Dropbox, Margie SH Archive. I started saving some things in this folder many years ago, long before I knew Holmes and his creator were going to be such a big part of my life, and long before I had access to the kind of resources now easily available on the internet. Every now and then, I get the foolish idea I should simply delete most of the things in the file. 

There is nothing rare there. Some of the files have not been opened in a decade. And, yet, when it comes to deleting them, I can't make myself do it. There was a time when I deleted with abandon but something happened awhile back to my brain and now I'm stuck. I have, to some degree, the same problem Holmes had, as described by Watson in "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual":

Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics, which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish, or in even less desirable places.  But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them, for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy, during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving, save from the sofa to the table.  Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner.

My butter dish is 98% spotless (The husband sometimes leaves toast crumbs!) and my files are all sorted into categories in specific folders in a timely manner, but they can not, on no account, be deleted. Sometimes a duplicate will turn up when I've forgotten I saved the same document or photo four or five years ago. I have trouble deleting the duplicate. A few old things I have can't be found too easily anymore, like a monstrous and wondrous spreadsheet which begins with:

"Just the Facts"  Canonical Database version 10.1      © 2004-2012  Joseph E. Dierkes

Welcome to the latest version of the Canonical Database!   This is a genuine work in progress, and future versions with even greater accuracy and more detail will be made available as time permits. Be sure to visit this website often to check for the latest updates.  It was created with Microsoft's Excel 97 software, is named "Just_the_Facts_V10.1.xls", and is sorted into "Doubleday Order"  (the order as given in "The Complete Sherlock Holmes" vols 1 & 2).

I realize a serious collector would look at my files and say with a justifiably haughty sneer, "Amateur." True, but still. It is my stuff and I want it. I try to keep the main folders to a minimum:

 The system is not perfect. Somewhere along the way, I lost my files for The Sound of the Baskervilles for 2007-2014. I want to cry when I think about it. I don't know what happened. The ones titled My Special Projects and  Reference Materials actually need to be about a dozen more separate folders but it all starts feeling too messy if I add any more separation. I keep trying for the neatness Watson longed for.

These files don't include any of my fiction writing/editing projects, or any work I've done for The Arthur Conan Doyle Society. Those files are in a separate Margie Writing Archive. I guess I should be grateful I don't have to keep all this stuff on paper. I know there are Sherlockians with mountains of paper files. I envy them in many ways. But, as said before, I am an amateur. My M files won't be going to any library archives anywhere.  They will just be here, making me happy. 

Holmes ends his thoughts about his M file with "...here is our friend of to-night." My files have my Sherlockian friends in them--papers, photos, quizzes, blog posts, etc. It makes me feel good anytime I look in the files and I see names I care about. 

Whenever I feel too much darkness around, I can open an M file and get a 7% solution of happy, like this:

I think Watson would understand. I have a feeling a certain dispatch box wasn't exactly small.