The Bust of Napoleon
Taken from a marble copy of Devine’s head of Napoleon, the busts were made by Gelder & Co., of Stepney. The cast was taken in two moulds from each side of the face, and then these profiles of plaster of Paris were joined together to form the complete bust. When finished, the busts were put on a table in the passage to dry and afterwards stored. Their wholesale price was six shillings, but the retailer would get twelve or more.
The Irene Adler Photo Frame
“To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.” - Dr. Watson
The original cabinet card photograph, taken by the King of Bohemia’s personal photographer and the only payment exacted by Holmes for his efforts in the case, was kept in a protective, brownish-orange traveling frame inside the top desk drawer of the detective’s rooms at 221b. As one of Sherlock’s prized keepsakes, Watson has kept it in perfect condition.
The Persian Slipper
Sherlock kept his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece. As he would frequently help himself to tobacco from Sherlock’s Persian slipper, this was one of the items Watson most desired to preserve.
The Death of Sherlock Note
“From the top of this boulder the gleam of something bright caught my eye, and, raising my hand, I found that it came from the silver cigarette case which he used to carry. As I took it up a small square of paper upon which it had lain fluttered down on to the ground. Unfolding it, I found that it consisted of three pages torn from his note-book and addressed to me. It was characteristic of the man that the direction was as precise, and the writing as firm and clear, as though it had been written in his study.” - Dr. Watson
The Falls Of Reichenbach
"It is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamor. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss."
Woodcut printed on 24"x36" cardstock.
