How The Fourth Garrideb Came To Be

“…it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town.”

– The Adventure of the Greek Interpreter (GREE)

Welcome to The Fourth Garrideb, a scion where we celebrate Canonical and Conanical numismatics.  There are many specialized Sherlockian scions devoted to very narrow fields – The Elusive Bicyclists, Moriarty’s Mathematicians, and The Practical, But Limited, Geologists, just to name a few.  Why shouldn’t there be a scion devoted to Sherlockians who are also coin collectors.

Back in the early and mid 1990’s, Ed Rochette and I had a few conversations, while we were attending annual conventions of the American Numismatic Association (ANA), about forming a Sherlockian coin club.  Unfortunately, we were never able to follow up on this.

Fast forward to January 2014.  Yours truly was laid up with a severely broken right ankle for several months and started rereading the Canon.  Also during this time, season 3 of BBC’s Sherlock premiered on my local PBS station.  I started recalling my conversations with Ed and decided to see if it would be feasible to try to form a club of coin collecting Sherlockians.

I reached out to a few other collectors via email and the response was positive.  A few weeks later, The E-Sylum published a query of mine on this topic and several other coin collectors responded with interest.  It was decided that we would meet in Chicago during the American Numismatic Association’s World’s Fair of Money in August.

Seven brave and hearty souls arrived for our organizational meeting on Saturday, August 9, 2014. These seven Founding Charter members will be known as Syracusan Members – of the finest period.

There was a general discussion about whether a club like ours would be of interest to others and it was decided that it was.  Conversation followed regarding coins being mentioned in the various Holmes stories and I shared some literature from my library relating to Holmes and Numismatics.

Bob Fritsch suggested we call ourselves The Fourth Garrideb, after The Adventures of the Three Garridebs, and recounted how Ed Rochette referred to himself as Nathan Garrideb.  It was unanimously decided to use this as our name.

Another discussion centered around the need to catalog Holmes related numismatic items and it was agreed that this would be one of our scion’s major goals. It was also discussed that we would produce an electronic journal, with the possibility of a annual hard copy of the previous year’s posts.

Shortly after the meeting, we applied for membership as a club with the ANA.  Most of TFG’s administrative matters will be handled by myself, and after consulting with the other members, this position will be known as the Mycroft, as he “is the British government.”

We are proud that TFG will take its place among the coin clubs and BSI scions.