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Rating: 
Summary: OK If You Need A Yugo
Review: The most one can say about this edition of the Holmes stories is that it's inexpensive. It contains roughly the first half of the canon, through "The Hound of the Baskervilles." (A second volume completes the canon.) It includes a fair amount of auxillery material: multiple introductions, same-page and end-of-book annotations, and a few pages each of critical commentary, biographical info, and reading-group-style questions. The cover design is attractive and the paper is not as bad as it might be. A lot for $7.95--as they say, "a good value"--but you get what you pay for. The section of "critical commentary" in the back is little more than a series of squibs that are so brief they're useless--a virtual parody of what, say, a Norton Critical Edition would offer. (One of them, a paragraph from a Raymond Chandler essay, is ripped totally from context and fails to suggest how very much the author hated Sherlock Holmes.) The explanatory notes are not entirely reliable and the questions for study in the back are dull when they're not actively stupid--patronizing variations on the crappy "Reading Comprehension" questions featured in middle-school textbooks. The bibliography, too, is objectionable: the editor rightly refers, for example, to Daniel Stashower's biography of Conan Doyle, but of what possible use is it to be told that it is a "large, handsome volume?" (I mean, the hardcover is out of print and the paperback--what most readers will see--is just a typical trade paperback.) Is it useful to say of Dakin's "Sherlock Holmes Commentary" just that it's full of delightful information? Even the attractive cover belies ineptitude: on the back it claims that the book concludes with "The Final Problem," when it really finishes with the "Hound." Did anyone proof this thing? All of which is to say that this is a volume that, though it mimics the better lines of classics, is really produced on the cheap. (You might as well buy the Bantam two-volume Holmes for the same price: No extras, but at least it's pocket-sized and free of the highly irritating editor's voice of this edition.) Perhaps it's unfair to complain in this way about something so inexpensive. Brand X cola is brand X cola, and it's not exactly ripping you off. It's vaguely offensive, though, when a publisher so transparently tries to bulk up the "value" of its product with inferior bells and whistles. You know, when a Yugo pretends to be a Corvette, it's just plain annoying.
Rating:
Summary: OK If You Need A Yugo
Review: The most one can say about this edition of the Holmes stories is that it's inexpensive. It contains roughly the first half of the canon, through "The Hound of the Baskervilles." (A second volume completes the canon.) It includes a fair amount of auxillery material: multiple introductions, same-page and end-of-book annotations, and a few pages each of critical commentary, biographical info, and reading-group-style questions. The cover design is attractive and the paper is not as bad as it might be. A lot for $7.95--as they say, "a good value"--but you get what you pay for. The section of "critical commentary" in the back is little more than a series of squibs that are so brief they're useless--a virtual parody of what, say, a Norton Critical Edition would offer. (One of them, a paragraph from a Raymond Chandler essay, is ripped totally from context and fails to suggest how very much the author hated Sherlock Holmes.) The explanatory notes are not entirely reliable and the questions for study in the back are dull when they're not actively stupid--patronizing variations on the crappy "Reading Comprehension" questions featured in middle-school textbooks. The bibliography, too, is objectionable: the editor rightly refers, for example, to Daniel Stashower's biography of Conan Doyle, but of what possible use is it to be told that it is a "large, handsome volume?" (I mean, the hardcover is out of print and the paperback--what most readers will see--is just a typical trade paperback.) Is it useful to say of Dakin's "Sherlock Holmes Commentary" just that it's full of delightful information? Even the attractive cover belies ineptitude: on the back it claims that the book concludes with "The Final Problem," when it really finishes with the "Hound." Did anyone proof this thing? All of which is to say that this is a volume that, though it mimics the better lines of classics, is really produced on the cheap. (You might as well buy the Bantam two-volume Holmes for the same price: No extras, but at least it's pocket-sized and free of the highly irritating editor's voice of this edition.) Perhaps it's unfair to complain in this way about something so inexpensive. Brand X cola is brand X cola, and it's not exactly ripping you off. It's vaguely offensive, though, when a publisher so transparently tries to bulk up the "value" of its product with inferior bells and whistles. You know, when a Yugo pretends to be a Corvette, it's just plain annoying.
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