Arthur Conan Doyle: The Sherlock Holmes Collection

This is a review of one particular edition: The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Collector\’s Library) Hardcover – October 9, 2012 Series: Collector\’s Library Hardcover: 712 pages Publisher: Collector\’s Library Editions (October 9, 2012) ISBN-10: 9781907360459 ISBN-13: 978-1907360459 http://www.amazon.com/dp/190736045X It took a long time to find an edition that meets all these requirements, but this one did: * All 4 novels and 56 stories in one collection. * All original illustrations by Sidney Paget. * Recent enough printing to be on acid-free paper. * Decent multi-column typesetting (particularly, not tiny print running all the way across a large page). * Quality, full cloth binding. The only drawback in this edition is the quality of the illustrations. They are poorly digitized and reprinted, especially apparent on the enlarged ones. A simple photocopy would have worked a lot better. But they\’re passable.

I wanted to write a review to show some actual photos of the box set that is being sold on this page. Overall I’m extremely happy with my purchase. For $20 you get 6 books. 4 of the 6 are the complete Sherlock Holmes Canon, mostly illustrated. I knocked one star because one of the books feels really superfluous since it just collects stories you already own which is kind of annoying. I’ll let it slide because that volume would be a great way to introduce a friend into Sherlock Holmes. The books are of really good quality for paperbacks. The type is easy to read and the illustrations are the originals from when the stories were originally published. I would recommend this set to anyone looking for an inexpensive way to pick up the Sherlock Holmes canon

I am most definitely a fan of Sherlock Holmes, but I\’ve not read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle\’s original writing until I purchased this complete collection (for $0.99!). I am not a purest, I like all the versions of Sherlock from the Granada TV series with Jeremy Brett (my favorite) to the amazing BBC series \’Sherlock\’ to the contemporary TV series \’Elementary\’ to even the Robert Downy Jr. movies. I enjoy them all. Though Jeremy Brett\’s TV series and Sherlock stand out for me. But… to the writing. I am amazed as how relevant and current day the reading Sir Doyle\’s stories feel. These are stories written from 1886 into the early 1900\’s. I expected the writing to be much more dated and stiff than it was, the writing flowed easily and naturally. My expectations stemmed from reading a lot of H Beam Piper stories from the 1950\’s that felt very dated, so when I picked up these stories I expected to be much worse. Other than a few words here and there that no longer held the same context, and some not used at all anymore… I found myself quite enjoying the writing of Sir Doyle. Many of the stories were like novella\’s or short stories, while some are longer and more engaged. Hard to tell with a lack of a useful index with this book. I\’m more than halfway through the collection right now, I\’ve stopped to give myself some non-Sherlock life experience and something to look forward to when the winter kicks in. Taking 1 star off for the lack of an index that works on my Kindle. For such a large group of books, the index is really, really needed here. Highly recommend the purchase of this collection if you a fan of the detective work like Sherlock. Best $1 you will spend for a long time!

*Update* Upon closer examination, these books look just plain cheap and poorly made. The pages are even falling out of one of the books because the spine is too narrow for the number of pages. DO NOT PURCHASE. Books look like they’ve been used or stored very poorly. I ordered new copies and I am very disappointed with this purchase. If you would like to both read and display your books, I would look elsewhere. Will be returning ASAP.

Only problem was some annotation would have helped because some of the terms are British and are in the context of a past century so there were lots of confusing parts that I had to Google. The English was stilted compared to modern American English, but I got used to it in time, but there were still areas for confusion that annotations would have cleared up.

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