ALLEN, Grant, The Attis of Caius Valerius Catullus: Translated into English Verse, with Dissertations on the Myth of Attis, on the Origin of Tree-Worship, and on the Gallambic Metre (D. Nutt, London), 1892

8vo; pp. xvi, 154, 2

Very good condition: paper-covered thin card covers a bumped

The most esoteric of all Holmesiana – in every sense. A volume that is obliquely described in ‘The Empty House’. That story describes Holmes’ return from Reichenbach in the guise of a shabby bookseller. As Watson recounts:

I struck against an elderly deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship.

Soon the ‘poor bibliophile’ offers to sell Watson the same volume, calling it a ‘Catullus’. Recalling that ‘The Empty House’ is set in 1894, we can apply Holmes’ deductive method, and identify the present volume as precisely the work that Arthur Conan Doyle had in mind when writing this famous continuation of the Holmes stories – a fitting tribute to Conan Doyle’s friend and neighbour Grant Allen, who had died in 1899, four years before ‘The Empty House’ was published.