Sherlock Holmes Handbook. Christopher Redmond
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and pay fees to the estate, and most books that feature “Sherlock Holmes” include a fine-print acknowledgement to that effect.
Meanwhile, the estate of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself had been tangled in litigation among his children and their heirs for decades beginning in the 1950s. A settlement was at last reached shortly before Dame Jean’s death, and by 2004 the assets of that estate had been distributed. There remains, however, “the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Literary Estate,” operated by Andrea Plunket, the former wife of television producer Sheldon Reynolds. He had first been involved with the use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in the 1950s, and acquired the copyrights from a receiver in bankruptcy in 1974, shortly before their 1980 expiry in Britain and Dame Jean’s “recapture” in the United States. The estate headed by Plunket now maintains a web site (www.sherlockholmesonline.org) and has lawyers who maintain that it owns the American rights to the Sherlock Holmes stories. Such claims have been repeatedly rejected in U.S. federal court decisions in favour of the estate of Dame Jean.
The original magazine publication, and the newspaper syndication that followed in most cases, did not exhaust publishers’ interest in the Canonical stories, as they were republished in American and British newspapers from the early 1890s through the early years of the twentieth century. The New York World Sunday magazine rediscovered The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes in 1905, for example; the Boston Sunday Post published the stories of The Return as “Masterpieces of Sherlock Holmes” in 1911.
Authorized publishers continued to bring out the books in full. Some of the Sherlock Holmes tales appear in the official “Author’s Edition” of Doyle’s works (1903). All are among the twenty-four volumes of the “Crowborough Edition,” begun before Doyle’s death in 1930 and published posthumously in a limited edition of 760 sets; many copies include signatures which the author affixed to pre-publication sheets. The Complete Sherlock Holmes was published in eight volumes by P.F. Collier & Son in 1928, and a six-volume edition followed in 1936. A ten-volume “Literary Guild” edition was produced by Doubleday in 1933.
In addition there were many piracies, that is, books published without the author’s approval. In the 1890s in particular, The Sign of the Four (in more than two hundred unauthorized editions) and A Study in Scarlet were extensively pirated by American publishers operating in a free-for-all atmosphere. Donald Redmond in Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates (1990) identifies and classifies many of those early volumes, but a full bibliographical listing of them will probably never be compiled.
Partial collections of Canonical stories have appeared over the decades with such titles as Conan Doyle’s Stories for Boys (1938), Famous Tales of Sherlock Holmes (1958), and Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Cases (1966). In addition, a few stories were published yet again in periodical format, the oddest examples being an excerpt from The Sign of the Four and the full texts of “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Copper Beeches,” which graced the first three issues of Playboy magazine (1954). Many of the stories have been used in anthologies, from “The Dancing Men” in Famous Stories of Code and Cipher (1947) and “A Scandal in Bohemia” in With All My Love: An Anthology (1945) to “The Five Orange Pips” in Masterpieces of Mystery & Detection (1965). Unusual publications also include Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Textbook of Friendship (1944), edited by Christopher Morley and including two novels (one abridged), five short stories, and extensive notes. A little later came The Blue Carbuncle (1948), a slipcased collector’s item published by the Baker Street Irregulars.
Over the decades, by far the most commonly available version of the stories in North America has been The Complete Sherlock Holmes, published by Doubleday. The first of several Doubleday Completes was the “Memorial Edition,” shortly after Doyle’s death in 1930, which had erratic and repetitive pagination because it was printed from the plates previously used for separate volumes of the various tales. It also presented “In Memoriam Sherlock Holmes,” an eloquent if maudlin introduction by Christopher Morley, which has been a fixture ever since. A one-volume edition of The Complete followed in 1936. Early Sherlockian writings frequently refer to its 1,323-page layout, also published (from the same printing plates) as “the Literary Guild Edition” and “the De Luxe Edition” in two-volume and one-volume formats. One-volume and two-volume editions in a new format of 1,122 pages were introduced in 1960 and remain standard, in part because over several decades the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed many thousands of whatever was the most recent impression.
The one-volume Doubleday edition has also appeared as a Penguin paperback. These editions, widely and inexpensively available, have been the standard to which reference works have generally been keyed. In recent years, however, the Doubleday edition has had rivals, including two-volume paperback editions from Bantam Classics and Barnes & Noble, as well as innumerable editions of the earlier volumes of the Canon that are no longer protected by copyright. The word piracy no longer strictly applies, but contemporary paperback collections are often as cheap in every way as were the piracies of the 1890s.
The Doubleday edition suffers from a good deal of textual corruption — a famous example is “Somomy” for the historical racehorse Isonomy mentioned in “Silver Blaze” — and when he undertook to edit the entire Canon for the Limited Editions Club in the early 1940s, Edgar W. Smith laboured to correct errors and misapprehensions, eventually producing what is still widely thought to be the best text available. The original idea had been to bring out all the stories with illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele, who had already created the art for about half of them. George Macy of the Limited Editions Club commissioned him to do the other half, but Steele died in 1944 with little of the work completed. Other artists filled the breach, and the edition finally appeared as The Adventures (three volumes, 1950), The Later Adventures (three volumes, 1952), and The Final Adventures (two volumes, 1952) with introductions and notes by several scholars. Jon L. Lellenberg in Irregular Crises of the Late ’Forties (1999) tells the story of the delays and difficulties that lay behind the project, particularly resistance from Adrian Conan Doyle, who was then managing his father’s estate. Lellenberg writes that the Limited Editions Club achievement deserves, for the efforts of Smith and others and the joy with which it was received, to be remembered as “the Baker Street Irregulars edition” of the Canon. It was republished in 1952–57 as a three-volume edition from the Heritage Club, and facsimiles were issued by Easton Press in 1987 and 1996.
In Britain, the standard edition for many years was a two-volume set from the old publishing firm of John Murray: The Complete Sherlock Holmes: Long Stories and Short Stories, cited as “S” and “L” with a page number by some British commentators. John Murray is now part of a conglomerate, and its Sherlock Holmes is no longer to be found in bookshops. In its place there are hardback volumes, both titled The Complete Sherlock Holmes, from Wordsworth and CRW Publishing; a six-volume hardback set also from CRW; and multi-volume paperback editions from Wordsworth and Headline Review. All these choices provide a British text of the stories — that is, for example, one of the stories is titled “The Reigate Squires,” not “The Reigate Puzzle,” and the textual errors introduced in the Doubleday on the other side of the Atlantic do not appear. British readers can, however, get the Doubleday text if they like, as the Penguin paperback Complete is also easily available.
There is a frequent desire among Sherlockians for facsimile editions in which the original Strand appearance of the stories, including Sidney Paget illustrations, is reproduced. The most satisfactory of these is a heavy volume of 1,126 pages, The Original Illustrated ‘Strand’ Sherlock Holmes, with the Strand pages enlarged from their original size (and A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which never appeared in the Strand, set in a similar typeface and format). Unlike some earlier facsimiles, this one manages clear and bright reproduction of the drawings by Paget and his successors. The British edition appeared from Wordsworth in 1989, the American from Mallard Press in 1990. The price of its elegance is a weight that makes the book impractical for, say, reading in bed without the