Anyone searching for clues about the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes need not look only to his headquarters on London's Baker Street.
Deep in an underground cavern at the University of Minnesota lies the world's largest collection of Holmes memorabilia — a cache sure to expand with material from the new "Sherlock Holmes" movie starring Robert Downey Jr. as the pipe-puffing super sleuth.
To many, it's a mystery how this trove of tens of thousands of books, toys, games, posters and recordings — from copies of the Holmes stories owned by the last empress of Russia to an original manuscript page of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" — ended up at a Midwestern university, half a world away from the foggy London streets of Holmes and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The answer is elementary, according to Tim Johnson, curator of special collections and rare books at the University of Minnesota Libraries: A "happy series of accidents" involving a retired university librarian, a Nobel Prize laureate and a Holmes fan who took a "vacuum cleaner" approach to collecting.
"People think the Holmes collection ought to be in London. So it's 'why Minnesota?' And it's really just this series of happy events that occurred over time," Johnson said.
"Sherlock Holmes," already out in Britain, is being released Christmas Day in the U.S. Directed by Guy Ritchie ("Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"), the film stars Downey ("Iron Man") as a man-of-action Holmes unraveling a nefarious plot by Lord Blackwood in Victorian England with the help of his sidekick Dr. John Watson, played by Jude Law.
The Holmes collection in Minnesota has between 15,000 and 16,000 volumes, and other pieces bring the archive to 60,000 or more, Johnson said. They are kept in a cavern, fitted out for storage, about 85 feet below ground at the Elmer L. Andersen Library, where temperatures and humidity are controlled.
On metal shelves sit memorabilia including magnifying glasses, an ice cream carton with a cartoon cow wearing Holmes' iconic deerstalker cap and a pillow with an image of Sherlock Hemlock, a Muppet character from "Sesame Street."