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Summary: If you purchase only ONE book to add to the canon...
Review: ...then this should be the one. It is a true pleasure to curl up with this book. Explore massive additional resources which inform you about London at the time of Sherlock Holmes' adventures.You can't go wrong purchasing this on. The only drawback - the books are REALLY LARGE. If you travel a lot I doubt you'll take this one with you! Bill
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Summary: It's no mystery!
Review: Although I am French, I really like that Sherlock Holmes guy. He is clever in getting the mystery solved. I like Dr. Watson,too. This book is doing a great job to help people to know what is like in Enland when Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson lived. One thing it does not know, that my great-grandmother told to me. These two Enlish guys liked to go to theirs smoking clubs and have some drinks and eat their poppyseed muffins because it is good with the drinks. Only trouble is that the poppyseeds is like opium in the baking goods. That is where Sherlock Holmes, he got started on the sad path to opium addiction, so my great-grandmother says to me. Her mother told her this. She lived during some of those days when Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were solving all those bad things going on into London, England....Presented by.....................Summer!
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Summary: YESSS!
Review: Awesome is the only word I can think of to describe this particular collection--there is all the novels and stories with amplifing info on particular items in the story/novel you are reading listed on the sides of the pages, ala footnotes (sidenotes?)--and the supplementary info is staggering, with bios of Doyle, Holmes, Watson AND Moriarty, the history of Holmes on stage, screen and in print, 221B Baker Street info, etc.--these sections take up at LEAST the front 3rd or 4th of the 1st volume alone! If you are a Holmes fan, you MUST find and buy this collection ASAP!
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Summary: For the Sherlock Homes enthusiasts
Review: If you ever wanted to read the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, this is the best book to buy. Also, if you are one of those Sherlock fans, you will certainly appreciate this book. Apart from Conan Doyle's original text, this book presents lots of interesting information about Victorian England, linking it with the text. If Holmes spends a crown on something, Baring-Gould will not only calculate its value today but will also show you a picture of the coins at that time. If Holmes and Dr. Watson have to take a transportation to go somewhere, Baring-Gould will show a picture and description of the exact transportation they used. Finally, if the two inseparable friends have to investigate something in a specific address, the book shows a map or picture of the site. However, the book most interesting quality is an extensive research the editor made in order to sort the stories chronologically, not in the order Conan Doyle wrote them but in the order they in fact happened. All those details make the book so real that after you finish this book, you will get a strange feeling that the most famous fictitious detective in the world really lived at 221b Baker Street or a strange feeling that Holmes was not simply a delusion of Dr. Watson, himself the alter ego of Conan Doyle.
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Summary: A godsend for any Holmes fan
Review: Sherlock Holmes has been an obsession of mine since adolescence. When I came across this relatively expensive set of books in junior high school, I ran home and did every chore in the world in my entire neighborhood for three straight days --and added up the dimes and quarters people would give me until I had enough to buy these two volumes. They have been with me ever since. For the first time, I understood what all those words were that I couldn't find in a dictionary, with illustrations and explanations. Even more amazing, I learned that Sherlock Holmes was a real person -- or at least, the editors of these books believed so! The product of a great generation of Holmes fanatics, this collection is full of the arguments over what each story means, what has been included by Dr. Watson, and what must have been left out to protect the innocent. The one truly indispensable volume for Holmes fans, "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes" is an unadulterated joy!
Rating:
Summary: A godsend for any Holmes fan
Review: Sherlock Holmes has been an obsession of mine since adolescence. When I came across this relatively expensive set of books in junior high school, I ran home and did every chore in the world in my entire neighborhood for three straight days --and added up the dimes and quarters people would give me until I had enough to buy these two volumes. They have been with me ever since. For the first time, I understood what all those words were that I couldn't find in a dictionary, with illustrations and explanations. Even more amazing, I learned that Sherlock Holmes was a real person -- or at least, the editors of these books believed so! The product of a great generation of Holmes fanatics, this collection is full of the arguments over what each story means, what has been included by Dr. Watson, and what must have been left out to protect the innocent. The one truly indispensable volume for Holmes fans, "The Annotated Sherlock Holmes" is an unadulterated joy!
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Summary: "But he had not the supreme gift of the artist.
Review: the knowledge of when to stop." Thus remarks Holmes to Lestrade about the villainous Jonas Oldacre ( By the bye giving an excellent piece of advice to all artists, villainous or not. Truly the stage, as Watson keeps reminding us, lost a great actor when Holmes embarked upon the profession of consulting detective ) It would appear that Jonas, in his attempt to send the innocent John Hector Mc Farlane to the gallows, could not resist adding a final touch which brought his nefarious plans crashing down---he planted a stain of blood on the wall upon which Mc Farlane's fingerprint would be found! Lestrade: "You are aware that no two thumb-marks are alike ? "
Holmes: "I have heard something of the kind. " Whereupon Wiliaim S Baring-Gould, greatest of Holmseian addict/scholars treats us to a footnote on the margin regarding Galton's method of fingerprining, given to the British Association in 1899 and concludes that-- By my gold amethyst encrusted snuff-box, this is fun! It's the best rendering of Conan Doyle's canon, complete with maps of London, illustrations from Collier's, vintage 1903; coats of arms, photographs, drawings--in brief, the world of S.H. made explicable, and vivid. Naturally you knew that when Watson informs us that their long suffering landlady, Mrs.Hudson, lived on the first floor flat, he's using it in the English sense: what we Americans would call 'the second floor.' Or that a 'life preserver' was a short bludgeon, usually of flexible cane, whalebone, or the like loaded with lead at one end. Or that--- Hmm...now what was that about the supreme gift of the artist?
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Summary: A must-have for everyone
Review: The other reviewers have given this item 5 stars and called it indispensable. I cannot gainsay either judgment, nor would I desire to. I first read these two volumes when I was about 11 and they were just a couple years old (first published 1967); when the Speckled Band could give me nightmares. I bought my boxed set (2nd edition, 6th printing, 1971) from the downtown Boston Barnes and Noble when I started college in 1977. They have traveled everywhere with me since. This version of the canon cannot be praised too highly. The first hundred pages of volume 1 (which is about 690 pages total) consist of essays about the background of the author and characters, real life models for the protagonists, early translations and dramatizations on stage and celluloid, clubs devoted to the immortal pair, and other fascinating background info. There are helpful maps of London and England as well. Once the stories begin (and flow into Volume 2, which is an even heftier 824 pages), the lucky reader enjoys not only plentiful marginal notes (not end or footnotes, but comments right next to the text where each reference appears) about guns, money, locales, historic events, and just about anything one might not know if one weren't a Victorian. There are also reproductions of illustrations that accompanied the stories in the Strand and other magazines where they initially appeared. This is a pair of books to treasure and reread (I've read a number of my favorites, such as "Silver Blaze" and "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle," aloud to friends, family, and lovers) all one's life.
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Summary: The definitive reference work of Sherlock Holmes
Review: This is one of the few books that I consistently reread every so often. It is heavily annotated, with forays into all conceivable areas of interest, even those as seemingly obscure as the train-schedules of Victorian London. This book is indispensable for anyone inetersted in Holmes.
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Summary: Get it if you can find it.
Review: W.S. Baring-Gould was arguably the finest Sherlockian scholar who has ever lived, and this brilliant two-volume set is his attempt to put the canonical Holmes tales into some sort of chronological order. Into the bargain we get helpful essays and marginal notes, along with some of the illustrations from the stories' original publication. Not just a collection of the complete canon, then, this set is also an important work of Sherlockian scholarship. Baring-Gould was also the author of the standard Holmes biography, _Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street_. Grab that one too, if you can find it. Baring-Gould's detective work must have been pretty darned good, because some of his speculations were confirmed in the mid-1970s with the discovery of a lost manuscript from the hand of Watson himself (edited by Nicholas Meyer and published under the title _The Seven Per Cent Solution_). I wish some of these kids today who write Holmes "pastiches" would consult both Baring-Gould _and_ Meyer before popping off into their unfounded speculations :-).
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