Today is our Fifth Anniversary!

“… five years – when I should have had a medal the size of a soup plate.”

– The Adventure of the Three Garridebs (3GAR)

Five years ago today, 7 gentlemen got together in Chicago during the World’s Fair of Money to discuss forming a Sherlockian coin club. Less than an hour later, everyone walked out of the room as a member of The Fourth Garrideb. So that means today is our 5th anniversary! Zoinks! We’re going to party like it’s 2014….

In the five years that have passed, we have:

• Published over 900 posts on this website. In 2016, we published A Fistful of Shillings, the first volume in Glittering Gold Guineas from the Fourth Garrideb , which took many of the best posts here and transferred them to the printed page.
• Produced many souvenirs. A quick glance shows a lapel pin, a wooden nickel, a challenge coin/medal, and several souvenir cards.
• Hosted several Numismatic Friends of Sherlock Holmes Dinners at the ANA World’s Fair of Money and National Money Shows.
• Have grown from the original seven members to now have 88 Garridebs. We’ll talk about this a little more further in this post.
• Cataloged over 400 numismatic items featuring Holmes, Dr. Watson, Arthur Conan Doyle and other Sherlockian themes.

Here is what we can look forward to coming up in the near future:

• TFG will be publishing a pastiche The Strange Case of the Fifty Talents by Gregory L. Zentz, the 18th Garrideb.
• Publication of For A Few Pounds More, the second volume in the Glittering Gold Guineas from the Fourth Garrideb series featuring posts from this website.
• Publication of The Numismatic Edgar Allan Poe, a catalog of numismatic items featuring Poe or his themes. This is a test effort and is the foundation for our next cataloging project – The Numismatic Sherlock Holmes.
• In addition to our Numismatic Friends dinners at the two ANA conventions, we will have smaller receptions at other coins shows and Sherlockian events if there are several Garridebs in attendance.
• More Souvenirs.

As was mentioned earlier, we now number nearly 90 in our membership. It’s quite an impressive bunch, when we look at some of our members’ accomplishments.

Numismatically, our members have/are:

• Editors of Numismatic News, The Numismatist and Coin World, as well as other speciality or club publications
• Served on the United States Assay Commission and the Citizens Coinage Advisory Commission.
• Published in the pages of Numismatic News, The Numismatist, Coin World, COINage, Coins, TAMS Journal and many other journals and publications.
• Author or editors of several standard catalogs or the definitive books on various numismatic topics.
• Been honored with the highest awards from the American Numismatic Association (the Farran Zerbe award) and the Numismatic Literary Guild (Clemmy Award).
• Multiple honorees of the Numismatic Ambassador Award from Krause Publications.
• Past Presidents and board members of the American Numismatic Association, as well as many other speciality, state or regional organizations.

In Sherlockian circles, our members have/are:

• Twenty three members of the Baker Street Irregulars and 15 members of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes. We anticipate this number to keep growing.
• Two of those BSI members have been honored with that group’s 2 Shillings award.
• Several have been published within the pages of The Baker Street Journal, the Sherlock Holmes Journal, the Watsonian and many, many more publications,
• Many have edited or contributed to books published by the BSI Press.

We’re going to stop telling you how about how great our members are since its hard to type while patting yourself on the back.

Curious where are members are located?

We have members in 25 of the 50 states and in a total of 7 countries (USA, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden and Brazil).Hopefully, we can fill in some of the blanks as we go forward.

Thank you to everyone who has joined us these past 5 years. I’m delighted that I can call so many of you friends and can assure you that this has far exceeded my wildest expectations and goals when we first talked about this crazy idea.