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This article offers a new perspective on the literary character Sherlock Holmes, who, though often noted for his cocaine and morphine injections, was actually more significantly dependent on tobacco smoking and printed matter for mental stimulation. Interpreting the pipe as metaphor and metonym for print, and noting his dependency on it to solve his cases, the article proposes Holmes as an early example of the figure of the media addict. It draws on stories, novels and illustrations, primarily from the early part of the Holmes oeuvre, and focuses on ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ (1891) (in Conan Doyle,The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009) to show how tobacco smoking becomes instrumental to the solution of the case, central to Holmes's persona, and reflective of readers' own addictive media consumption. The argument is contextualized by introducing readers to visual and literary tobacco discourse, the wealth of books, periodicals, smoke-room booklets, cigarette cards, reciters, posters and other ephemera that sprang up to advertise and accompany tobacco-smoking throughout the nineteenth century. In them, smoking was constantly compared with consuming print, through puns on ‘leaves’, ‘volumes’ and ‘puffs’ of speech preserved in paper. The article shows how Holmes's characteristic pose of sitting, thinking, and smoking engages and updates the figure of the genteel, masculine, bourgeois media consumer, who typically smokes and daydreams as he reads. Tobacco and print had been linked throughout the century but ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’ fully subordinates the latter to the former, making ‘the divine weed’ the instrument of Holmes' vaunted ratiocination. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]