Materials do not circulate, but may be used in the Special Collections reading room. Materials will be retrieved from and returned to storage areas by staff members.
This collection is protected by the Copyright Law of the United States (Title 17, U.S. Code). It is the user's responsibility to verify copyright ownership and to obtain all necessary permissions prior to the reproduction, publication, or other use of any portion of these materials.
The collection is organized alphabetically by author or title.
John Bennett Shaw was born October 10, 1913, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended the University of Notre Dame (A.B., cum laude, 1937), pursued graduate work at Columbia University (1937-1938), and completed a M.A. in literature from the University of Tulsa in 1940.
From 1938 to 1959 Shaw was secretary-manager of the Bennett Drilling Company in Tulsa. During that same period he was an instructor in literature at the University (1939-1940) and owner/manager of the Tulsa Book and Record Shop (1942-1954). From 1956 to 1970 Shaw served as funeral director of the Fitzgerald Funeral Service and from 1966-1970 as a lay director of the Catholic Center, also in Tulsa. In addition, Shaw chaired the Friends of the Tulsa Public Library twice between 1957-1970, was administrative chairman of the Tulsa City/County Library System (1961-1967), chairman of the Oklahoma Council of Libraries (1964-1966), member of the University of Notre Dame Library Council (1964-1970), the Oklahoma State Department of Libraries (1966-1970), and board member of St. John's Hospital School of Nursing (1962-1970).
Shaw held memberships in the American Library Trustees Association (secretary, 1968), Southwestern Library Association (second vice-president), Oklahoma Library Association (chairman, trustee division), Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem (knight commander), and the Baker Street Irregulars. He received the Citizen's Recognition Award from the Oklahoma Library Association in 1965 and the Citation of Merit from the American Library Association in 1968. In 1965, Shaw was invested in the Baker Street Irregulars as "The Hans Sloane of My Age." He was given the Two Shilling Award by the BSI "for extraordinary devotion to the cause beyond the call of duty" in 1980.
In his retirement, Shaw moved to Sante Fe, New Mexico, where he (along with his wife, Dorothy) continued to build what became the largest private collection of Sherlockiana in the world (and where he continued to share his knowledge and collections with the many pilgrims who visited Sante Fe or contacted him by mail or telephone). He was well-known across the Unites States and abroad for his lectures on Sherlock Holmes, and his classic work, "The Basic Holmesian Library," (colloquially known as "The Shaw 100") remains a valued bibliography among collectors. In the mid-1980s Shaw arranged for the transfer of his collection to the Univeristy of Minnesota, a process that was completed a decade later. Shaw died in Sante Fe on October 6, 1994.
The collection consists of manuscripts and essays regarding the character of Sherlock Holmes. Also contained in the collection are portions of Mr. Shaw's personal letters and correspondence that reference Sherlock Holmes.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the University of Minnesota Libraries. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should search the catalog using these headings.
The following section contains a detailed list of the materials in the collection.