Arthur Conan Doyle Room

It takes a shrewd detective to find one of the world’s foremost collections of library materials devoted to the life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories. Tucked away on the top floor of the Toronto Reference Library, the Arthur Conan Doyle Room is one of the city’s best-kept secrets. For those who make the effort, it’s well worth it. The collection is housed in a room decorated to look like Sherlock Holmes’ apartment at 221B Baker Street, London, with Victorian-era chairs, a Persian carpet, floor-to-ceiling wooden bookshelves, and a scattering of memorabilia and paraphernalia. The room is decorated with busts, statues, dolls, paintings, and posters of Sherlock Holmes, meerschaum pipes and deerstalker hats, and oddities such as a chess set with pieces carved to resemble Holmes, his sidekick Dr. Watson, and other characters from the series. The collection includes books, stories, and essays by Arthur Conan Doyle on spiritualism, true crime, history, and current issues of the day. He also wrote in several literary genres. But his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes, eclipsed his other writings, and this is reflected in the collection. The collection was established in 1969 with the purchase of more than 150 volumes from the estate of Arthur Baillie, a Toronto collector.