Lasting Impressions: The 25th Anniversary of the Bootmakers of Toronto

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Lasting Impressions was published to commemorate the Silver Anniversary
of Canada’s oldest and largest Sherlock Holmes society, The Bootmakers
of Toronto. Despite being marred by a number of typographical errors,
this handsome volume makes fascinating reading (albeit for a relatively
small group), from its introduction by Frances Schwenger, CEO of the
Toronto Reference Library, to a story index 413 pages later that tells
at which Bootmaker meeting each Holmes story was discussed. There is
also an author and subject index to every paper presented at Bootmaker
events from 1971 to 1996. Each of the 206 papers is abstracted,
sometimes at length, and we are told where the original can be found in
the Metro Library. These abstracts occupy nearly half the book.

“Sole-Prints: A Bootmaker Chronology,” by Mary Campbell, offers a
history of the Bootmakers from December 1971 to the end of 1996. Like
the book in general, it is for a very specific and limited audience. A
section by Christopher Redmond entitled “Sherlock Holmes from Sea to
Sea” is an irregular compendium of Canadian “connections with the
tales, their author, [and] the enthusiasts who read them.” Appendices
list Canadian scion societies and all the Bootmakers’ presidents and
award-winners. There are two articles that are of interest beyond the
Bootmaker fraternity: a tongue-in-cheek paper given by the politician
True Davidson in 1972, which received national media attention when it
made a case for Sherlock Holmes’s Canadian background, and a humorous
dissertation by Cameron Hollyer, the retired curator of the Arthur Conan
Doyle Collection at the Metro Reference Library, on the history of that
collection.