Norwood Notebook No. 1

Arthur Conan Doyle

Norwood Notebook No. 1

1885-1896

Idea Book. Generalia

Conan Doyle filled many notebooks over his long career, entering personal events, social encounters, and ideas, phrases, and research for his many literary endeavors. The Norwood Notebook, named for the community where he was then living, is a fascinating, wide-ranging collection of jottings. A few notes mention Sherlock Holmes while others range from thoughts about religion, poetic fragments, descriptive phrases, quotations from his reading, and snippets of dialogue, to oddities like figures on the UK’s arable acreage in 1896, and such bon mots as “R.S.V.P. Rump steak & veal pie.” When flipped and rotated, the notebook opens to calendar pages for 1885–1896, a trove of information for Sherlockians even though Conan Doyle’s entries reduce momentous events to single words or succinct phrases, including the laconic “Killed Holmes” for December 1893, when Holmes seemingly falls to his death in “The Adventure of the Final Problem.”