Wolff and Still Waters from The Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections Newsletter, University of Minnesota Libraries, Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2010. Julian Wolff had been a Baker Street Irregular twenty years when he wrote and published Still Waters in 1960, having come into the BSI thanks to Edgar W. Smith in 1940. He soon made himself a welcome and familiar figure there: at the 1941 annual dinner, he heard Rex Stout claim that “Watson Was a Woman,” and the following year he retorted on behalf of all: a “That Was No Lady” talk hurling back at Stout, in response to his previous year’s crypto-canonical-acrostic IRENE WATSON, one no less (if no more) legitimate spelling out NUTS TO REX STOUT. So Irregulars got a sense of Julian’s pawky humor early, and were surely unsurprised by Still Waters, an eight-page parody introducing holiday-season recipients to a Sherlock Holmes whose ability as a chemist rises to the level of alchemy in creating Instant Scotch Whisky—which (judging from Holmes’s and Watson’s condition the next day) involved more than mere scientific curiosity. Still Waters had been preceded in 1959 by A Case of Scotch, each indicating devotion to Guy Gilpatric’s picaresque Saturday Evening Post tales of boozy rapscallion tramp-steamer engineer Colin Glencannon (today forgotten, but then subject of a television series starring veteran character actor Thomas Mitchell). Or perhaps to Scotch itself; or just possibly both, self-administered in close combination. How many copies of Still Waters in wrappers were produced by Julian is unknown, but doubtless not that many in the smaller, more intimate Irregular circles of that day. As I write, the copy inscribed by Julian to the late Stanley Mackenzie can be yours from Boston bookseller Peter Stern for $175, only $175 over the original price. Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections is fortunate to own the copy Julian inscribed to W. T. Rabe “with the compliments of the season”; and knowing Bill Rabe, it would have been just the sort of thing he’d have relished. Perhaps Julian intended a series of indefinite length of these holiday parodies before the Commissionaire Curse struck him down. Still Waters was about the last unofficial act he was able to commit before being inundated by his labors as Edgar Smith’s successor in the Baker Street Irregulars. Julian was well-known to Sherlockians and Irregulars when he took over in 1961, and when he died at the age of 85 in 1990, but now twenty years have passed, and a recital of who Julian Wolff was and what he meant may be in order. Sometime in 1940, Julian, a physician specializing in work-related injuries, became acquainted with Edgar Smith, a vice president of General Motors Overseas Operations, and they discovered their mutual devotion to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Smith was preparing his gazetteer Baker Street and Beyond at the time: Julian drew five beautiful maps for it, turning them also into a privately printed portfolio. (More maps followed at various times, reprinted often, including by the late Lord Donegall of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London as his Christmas cards from 1961 to 1967.) Julian’s presence at the BSI dinners of the 1940s had been interrupted by war service that sent him to participate in the liberation of the Philippines (Army Medical Corps major, awarded the Bronze Star), but he was still one of the first to receive a Titular Investiture, in 1944, as “The Red-Headed League.” When Julian was home from the war, and Smith and Ben Abramson were starting up The Baker Street Journal in 1946, he agreed to be an assistant editor. He was known to Edgar Smith and the Irregulars as not only a delightful cartographer, but a student of heraldry and philately, and a bibliophile with broad interests and knowledge. He was a clubman whose memberships included, besides the BSI, the Grolier, The Players, and the Dutch Treat. He had returned to his medical practice, but as he remarked more than once, he’d always intended to work for 25 years and be retired 25 years, so in 1955 he retired from practice—in part to assist Edgar Smith with the BSI, making himself helpful with the society’s affairs. And when Edgar Smith died unexpectedly in September 1960, Julian had become a natural choice for his successor. In these less punctilious days, with other customs, it’s interesting to see how this unfolded. The BSI had suddenly lost the best and wisest man it had ever known, and Edgar’s oldest son, Edgar P. Smith, found himself proprietor of more than he expected in the BSI, Inc. (the incorporation one of Smith’s and Christopher Morley’s less fortune-starred ideas in the late 1940s). So leading Irregulars in New York put their heads together, an unimpeachable committee was formed, and a meeting with the Smiths took place. This report appeared in the January 1961 Baker Street Journal, following that month’s annual dinner at Cavanagh’s Restaurant: On 22 November 1960, at the call of Edgar P. Smith, a group of active Irregulars from the New York area, constituting an Irregular Executive Committee, met at the University Club. In addition to Edgar P. Smith and Robert Smith, the meeting was attended by William Baring-Gould, Owen Frisbie, Charles Honce, Robert K. Leavitt, James Nelson, Tom Stix [Sr.], Earle Walbridge, Frank Waters and Julian Wolff. The problems of The Baker Street Irregulars were discussed—the old ones as well as the more pressing new ones that had arisen with the loss of Edgar W. Smith. The first item on the agenda was the future of The Baker Street Irregulars, Inc.—as distinct from The Baker Street Irregulars. The corporation affairs, being handled by Edgar P. Smith, his brothers and their wives, required considerable time and effort. Alternative methods of procedure were considered. Then it was decided that the Journal would be continued, and Julian Wolff, who had been serving as Editor-pro-tem of the Journal, as well as acting Commissionaire of the Irregulars, was unanimously approved as Editor of The Baker Street Journal and Commissionaire of The Baker Street Irregulars. A silver dollar that had been presented to Julian Wolff by Mrs. Edgar W. Smith was adopted as the badge of office for the Commissionaire. This coin, formerly a prized possession of Edgar W. Smith, is dated 1894, the year of his birth, and it is mounted on a neck-cord. The meeting was then adjourned, after it had been decided to present a report of its deliberations and transactions to The Baker Street Irregulars at their meeting on 6 January 1961. At that function, “the brief business portion of the meeting consisted of the adoption, without dissent, of the Irregular Committee Report, given above. The report was presented by Edgar P. Smith and briefly discussed by William Baring-Gould.” Still Waters run deep. The BSI’s Constitution jocularly declares that “the duties of the Commissionaire shall be to telephone down for ice, White Rock, and whatever else may be required and available; to conduct all negotiations with waiters; and to assess the members pro rata for the cost of same.” Julian spent the rest of his retirement working harder than ever as Commissionaire, from late 1960 to January 1986. He also edited 62 issues of the BSJ from March 1961 to June 1977, when he turned it over to another. In those days of offset printing before computer word-processing, he produced every issue on two typewriters on his dining-room table, one with elite type, the other with pica, though in 1967 George Fletcher alleviated his burden a bit, and later transferred the production burden to Fordham University Press altogether after he had become its director. (See Fletcher, “Manhattan Evenings: Helping Julian With the Journal,” BSJ June 1986.) The succession of Smith by Wolff has been likened to that of FDR by Truman: that the BSI, too, went from strength to strength. During Julian’s quarter-century at the helm, the BSI flourished—both the select band honored for keeping the Memory green, and the BSI’s proliferating scion societies. During those years, the Martha Hudson Breakfast, the William Gillette Luncheon, the honoring of an avatar of The Woman, and Julian’s own cocktail party for Sherlockians became well-established features of an expanded BSI weekend each January. And during Julian’s sixteen years as editor of the BSJ, the steady growth of its subscription list eventually forced the change from a cottage industry to the much more professional-looking publication produced by Fordham U.P. As a person, Julian Wolff was short, balding, cherubic in appearance, courtly if uneffusive, with an underlying warmth balancing the outward reserve of a successful professional New Yorker of his generation. His customary reply to letters was a non-committal sentence or two on a postcard. But no Irregular letter went unanswered, no query from the mundane world ignored. Julian never sought publicity for himself, but neither did he neglect any opportunity to advance Sherlock Holmes’s public standing. While he seldom exercised his authority in society matters visibly, his innate dignity and Irregular credentials ensured that it was never questioned. The Irregulars’ great regard for him rested upon absolute confidence that the BSI’s affairs were in the hands of an unreservedly devoted gentleman. Most Irregulars would agree that if Julian had a fault, it was that he hated to say no to people, and seldom did. Certainly no one glancing beneath the surface of Julian’s aplomb doubted his human qualities and philanthropy. He liked people. He paid attention to newcomers. He was a generous host. For years he quietly subsidized the BSI dinner to make it more affordable to all, and he hosted his own party every January. When it outgrew his spacious Riverside Drive apartment, he moved it across town to the Grolier Club, where the body count of invitees and crashers soon passed 400, Julian paying the bill without a murmur. Julian encouraged Irregular scholarship in countless ways, and gave the BSI a public poise that avoided the labels of silliness or pomposity which a philistine Press might otherwise have tried to pin upon it. His wry humor could transform a BSI dinner from solemnity to hilarity with just a few words. He won the admiring affection of people far more outgoing and gregarious than himself. Julian was much celebrated in his lifetime. He was an Honorary Member of both the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and Sherlock Holmes Klubben i Danmark. While all the Irregulars “earn their Shilling,” in 1973 they surprised Julian with a Gold Sovereign. In 1976 Michael Harrison edited Beyond Baker Street, a collection of outstanding papers by 26 contributors as a Festschrift in Julian’s honor. In December 1979 his profile, sketched by Henry Lauritzen, adorned the cover and title page of the BSJ, instead of Frederic Dorr Steele’s trademark profile of Sherlock Holmes. The following month, as Julian turned 75, the microphone was taken away from him at the BSI dinner for a secretly prepared program of heartfelt tributes. And at the 1986 dinner, Julian’s announcement of his retirement was met by dismay and consternation. His brother Ezra, also an Irregular, captured the moment in his traditional morning-after poem recording the dinner’s goings-on: The Commissionaire said, as he rose, That his tenure had come to a close. His hearers, amazed, Spontaneously raised A thunderous chorus of noes. But Julian was 81 by then, and his mind was made up. The June ’86 BSJ, bearing his profile once more, printed a collection of fresh tributes to him. “Keeper of the Flame,” one Irregular called him, and it was more than apt.

Wolff and Still Waters

from The Friends of the Sherlock Holmes Collections Newsletter,

University of Minnesota Libraries, Vol. 14, No. 4, December 2010.

Julian Wolff had been a Baker Street Irregular twenty years when he wrote and published Still Waters in 1960, having come into the BSI thanks to Edgar W. Smith in 1940. He soon made himself a welcome and familiar figure there: at the 1941 annual dinner, he heard Rex Stout claim that “Watson Was a Woman,” and the following year he retorted on behalf of all: a “That Was No Lady” talk hurling back at Stout, in response to his previous year’s crypto-canonical-acrostic IRENE WATSON, one no less (if no more) legitimate spelling out NUTS TO REX STOUT.

So Irregulars got a sense of Julian’s pawky humor early, and were surely unsurprised by Still Waters, an eight-page parody introducing holiday-season recipients to a Sherlock Holmes whose ability as a chemist rises to the level of alchemy in creating Instant Scotch Whisky—which (judging from Holmes’s and Watson’s condition the next day) involved more than mere scientific curiosity. Still Waters had been preceded in 1959 by A Case of Scotch, each indicating devotion to Guy Gilpatric’s picaresque Saturday Evening Post tales of boozy rapscallion tramp-steamer engineer Colin Glencannon (today forgotten, but then subject of a television series starring veteran character actor Thomas Mitchell). Or perhaps to Scotch itself; or just possibly both, self-administered in close combination.

How many copies of Still Waters in wrappers were produced by Julian is unknown, but doubtless not that many in the smaller, more intimate Irregular circles of that day. As I write, the copy inscribed by Julian to the late Stanley Mackenzie can be yours from Boston bookseller Peter Stern for $175, only $175 over the original price. Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections is fortunate to own the copy Julian inscribed to W. T. Rabe “with the compliments of the season”; and knowing Bill Rabe, it would have been just the sort of thing he’d have relished.

Perhaps Julian intended a series of indefinite length of these holiday parodies before the Commissionaire Curse struck him down. Still Waters was about the last unofficial act he was able to commit before being inundated by his labors as Edgar Smith’s successor in the Baker Street Irregulars. Julian was well-known to Sherlockians and Irregulars when he took over in 1961, and when he died at the age of 85 in 1990, but now twenty years have passed, and a recital of who Julian Wolff was and what he meant may be in order.

Sometime in 1940, Julian, a physician specializing in work-related injuries, became acquainted with Edgar Smith, a vice president of General Motors Overseas Operations, and they discovered their mutual devotion to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Smith was preparing his gazetteer Baker Street and Beyond at the time: Julian drew five beautiful maps for it, turning them also into a privately printed portfolio. (More maps followed at various times, reprinted often, including by the late Lord Donegall of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London as his Christmas cards from 1961 to 1967.) Julian’s presence at the BSI dinners of the 1940s had been interrupted by war service that sent him to participate in the liberation of the Philippines (Army Medical Corps major, awarded the Bronze Star), but he was still one of the first to receive a Titular Investiture, in 1944, as “The Red-Headed League.”

When Julian was home from the war, and Smith and Ben Abramson were starting up The Baker Street Journal in 1946, he agreed to be an assistant editor. He was known to Edgar Smith and the Irregulars as not only a delightful cartographer, but a student of heraldry and philately, and a bibliophile with broad interests and knowledge. He was a clubman whose memberships included, besides the BSI, the Grolier, The Players, and the Dutch Treat. He had returned to his medical practice, but as he remarked more than once, he’d always intended to work for 25 years and be retired 25 years, so in 1955 he retired from practice—in part to assist Edgar Smith with the BSI, making himself helpful with the society’s affairs.

And when Edgar Smith died unexpectedly in September 1960, Julian had become a natural choice for his successor. In these less punctilious days, with other customs, it’s interesting to see how this unfolded. The BSI had suddenly lost the best and wisest man it had ever known, and Edgar’s oldest son, Edgar P. Smith, found himself proprietor of more than he expected in the BSI, Inc. (the incorporation one of Smith’s and Christopher Morley’s less fortune-starred ideas in the late 1940s). So leading Irregulars in New York put their heads together, an unimpeachable committee was formed, and a meeting with the Smiths took place. This report appeared in the January 1961 Baker Street Journal, following that month’s annual dinner at Cavanagh’s Restaurant:

On 22 November 1960, at the call of Edgar P. Smith, a group of active Irregulars from the New York area, constituting an Irregular Executive Committee, met at the University Club. In addition to Edgar P. Smith and Robert Smith, the meeting was attended by William Baring-Gould, Owen Frisbie, Charles Honce, Robert K. Leavitt, James Nelson, Tom Stix [Sr.], Earle Walbridge, Frank Waters and Julian Wolff. The problems of The Baker Street Irregulars were discussed—the old ones as well as the more pressing new ones that had arisen with the loss of Edgar W. Smith.

The first item on the agenda was the future of The Baker Street Irregulars, Inc.—as distinct from The Baker Street Irregulars. The corporation affairs, being handled by Edgar P. Smith, his brothers and their wives, required considerable time and effort. Alternative methods of procedure were considered.

Then it was decided that the Journal would be continued, and Julian Wolff, who had been serving as Editor-pro-tem of the Journal, as well as acting Commissionaire of the Irregulars, was unanimously approved as Editor of The Baker Street Journal and Commissionaire of The Baker Street Irregulars.

A silver dollar that had been presented to Julian Wolff by Mrs. Edgar W. Smith was adopted as the badge of office for the Commissionaire. This coin, formerly a prized possession of Edgar W. Smith, is dated 1894, the year of his birth, and it is mounted on a neck-cord.

The meeting was then adjourned, after it had been decided to present a report of its deliberations and transactions to The Baker Street Irregulars at their meeting on 6 January 1961.

At that function, “the brief business portion of the meeting consisted of the adoption, without dissent, of the Irregular Committee Report, given above. The report was presented by Edgar P. Smith and briefly discussed by William Baring-Gould.”

Still Waters run deep. The BSI’s Constitution jocularly declares that “the duties of the Commissionaire shall be to telephone down for ice, White Rock, and whatever else may be required and available; to conduct all negotiations with waiters; and to assess the members pro rata for the cost of same.” Julian spent the rest of his retirement working harder than ever as Commissionaire, from late 1960 to January 1986. He also edited 62 issues of the BSJ from March 1961 to June 1977, when he turned it over to another. In those days of offset printing before computer word-processing, he produced every issue on two typewriters on his dining-room table, one with elite type, the other with pica, though in 1967 George Fletcher alleviated his burden a bit, and later transferred the production burden to Fordham University Press altogether after he had become its director. (See Fletcher, “Manhattan Evenings: Helping Julian With the Journal,” BSJ June 1986.)

The succession of Smith by Wolff has been likened to that of FDR by Truman: that the BSI, too, went from strength to strength. During Julian’s quarter-century at the helm, the BSI flourished—both the select band honored for keeping the Memory green, and the BSI’s proliferating scion societies. During those years, the Martha Hudson Breakfast, the William Gillette Luncheon, the honoring of an avatar of The Woman, and Julian’s own cocktail party for Sherlockians became well-established features of an expanded BSI weekend each January. And during Julian’s sixteen years as editor of the BSJ, the steady growth of its subscription list eventually forced the change from a cottage industry to the much more professional-looking publication produced by Fordham U.P.

As a person, Julian Wolff was short, balding, cherubic in appearance, courtly if uneffusive, with an underlying warmth balancing the outward reserve of a successful professional New Yorker of his generation. His customary reply to letters was a non-committal sentence or two on a postcard. But no Irregular letter went unanswered, no query from the mundane world ignored. Julian never sought publicity for himself, but neither did he neglect any opportunity to advance Sherlock Holmes’s public standing. While he seldom exercised his authority in society matters visibly, his innate dignity and Irregular credentials ensured that it was never questioned. The Irregulars’ great regard for him rested upon absolute confidence that the BSI’s affairs were in the hands of an unreservedly devoted gentleman. Most Irregulars would agree that if Julian had a fault, it was that he hated to say no to people, and seldom did.

Certainly no one glancing beneath the surface of Julian’s aplomb doubted his human qualities and philanthropy. He liked people. He paid attention to newcomers. He was a generous host. For years he quietly subsidized the BSI dinner to make it more affordable to all, and he hosted his own party every January. When it outgrew his spacious Riverside Drive apartment, he moved it across town to the Grolier Club, where the body count of invitees and crashers soon passed 400, Julian paying the bill without a murmur. Julian encouraged Irregular scholarship in countless ways, and gave the BSI a public poise that avoided the labels of silliness or pomposity which a philistine Press might otherwise have tried to pin upon it. His wry humor could transform a BSI dinner from solemnity to hilarity with just a few words. He won the admiring affection of people far more outgoing and gregarious than himself.

Julian was much celebrated in his lifetime. He was an Honorary Member of both the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and Sherlock Holmes Klubben i Danmark. While all the Irregulars “earn their Shilling,” in 1973 they surprised Julian with a Gold Sovereign. In 1976 Michael Harrison edited Beyond Baker Street, a collection of outstanding papers by 26 contributors as a Festschrift in Julian’s honor. In December 1979 his profile, sketched by Henry Lauritzen, adorned the cover and title page of the BSJ, instead of Frederic Dorr Steele’s trademark profile of Sherlock Holmes. The following month, as Julian turned 75, the microphone was taken away from him at the BSI dinner for a secretly prepared program of heartfelt tributes. And at the 1986 dinner, Julian’s announcement of his retirement was met by dismay and consternation. His brother Ezra, also an Irregular, captured the moment in his traditional morning-after poem recording the dinner’s goings-on:

The Commissionaire said, as he rose,

That his tenure had come to a close.

His hearers, amazed,

Spontaneously raised

A thunderous chorus of noes.

But Julian was 81 by then, and his mind was made up. The June ’86 BSJ, bearing his profile once more, printed a collection of fresh tributes to him. “Keeper of the Flame,” one Irregular called him, and it was more than apt.