"What am I going to do with all this stuff when you die?” Joann Dobry asked her husband, Denny. 

She was referring to the Sherlock Holmes memorabilia and artifacts Denny has collected to create a replica of Holmes and Doctor Watson’s sitting room in the basement of their home near Reading, Pennsylvania. He decided to donate it to the University of Minnesota’s archive of Holmesian materials.

A retired engineer, Dobry became a big fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories as a teen. “I read The Adventure of the Speckled Bandin my ninth grade English class, and something registered,” he says. “I watched the (Basil) Rathbone movies over and over when I was in college and started collecting books after college. I discovered there was a world of Sherlockians in 1987, when the 100th anniversary of The Study in Scarlet was written up in the local newspaper.”

Then he met Paul Churchill, who had created a 221B Baker Street sitting room in the living and dining rooms of his house in Maryland. That’s when Dobry was inspired to create his own replica. “I had never been exposed to that part of collecting,” Dobry says. “Paul collected artifacts, objects that are mentioned in the stories. And that idea never occurred to me.”

Dobry has at least one item from every Holmes story and novel in his recreated sitting room. Most are authentic from the 1880s: train schedules, a violin, test tubes, an air rifle.

Timothy J. Johnson, the recently retired E. W. McDiarmid Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections at the university’s libraries, said, “I was very much aware of Denny’s collection before he decided to make his donation. Denny’s recreation of the sitting room at 221B Baker Street was very well known among the Sherlockian community.”

While visiting Dobry at his home, Johnson was alone in the sitting room for about an hour.

“It was an extraordinary experience to sit in the room and have a very real sense that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson would walk through the door at any moment. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like it. And I was deeply impressed by the work Denny had done in collecting all this material and arranging it the way he did. He had an item for each of the 60 Holmes adventures. That’s the dedication of an avid collector.”

According to a history of the University’s Holmes materials that Johnson published this year, the collection began in 1974 with the purchase of a notable collection of James Iraldi, made possible by a gift from the McKnight Foundation. Johnson wrote that John Bennett Shaw, builder of the world’s largest Holmes collection, delivered a lecture at the University, which led to a donation.

Other major collections followed. The donations and acquisitions of Holmes materials include the remarkable Philip H. Hench Collection given to the University in 1978. In 1987, the University purchased the Edith Meiser Collection, which contains scripts she wrote for Holmes radio plays. In 1992, mystery writer and editor Howard Haycraft—a 1928 U of M graduate—donated his collection that encompasses nearly the entire history and development of the Sherlock Holmes Collections. Today, the collections total more than 60,000 items.

But the University had nothing like Dobry’s detailed room.

It was a bittersweet decision for Dobry. He hosted an annual open house at his residence for Holmes fans to dine, sip soft drinks, and mingle with admirers of the fictional detective.

After the final open house in July, “I was exhausted, pleased with how everything went, and flattered that so many prominent Sherlockians took the time to attend,” Dobry says. “We had attendees from Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.”

But Dobry didn’t donate everything.

“I’m keeping several things that were given to me by Paul Churchill, a close friend and my inspiration for building the sitting room, who passed away in 2008. The things I’m keeping have little monetary value, but have great value to a Sherlockian—especially to me,” he says. “Actually, I’m getting anxious to get this chapter over. I made a lot of friends because of the sitting room, and I will always have them.”

And his wife won’t have to worry about what to do with the air rifle and test tubes.

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