Customer Reviews

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set)

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I cannot exaggerate the excellence of this edition. In almost every way, it's an improvement on its predecessor (the Baring-Gould "Annotated Holmes" of 1968). Like the earlier one, this is a "Sherlockian" edition which discusses the stories as if they were histories of actual persons and events-but it avoids the clubby, cutesy excesses of many Sherlockian publications and provides many useful historical asides and photographs. The annotations entertain and often enlighten.

The production values are stunning: the typography is elegant and clear, and despite the abundance of notes on many pages, the layout is never cluttered. It is big and heavy, but surprisingly you can actually READ this edition, which one cannot say for the Baring-Gould. And the reproductions of hundreds of period illustrations are simply the best I've ever seen in a Holmes edition. Sidney Paget (for example) has often been ill-served by muddy, contrast-less reproductions, but here they are as clean and crisp as the original materials probably permit them to be. Kudos to the photo editor!

My regrets are few. The introduction, though long and well-written, seems a bit skimpy treating the movie and radio adaptations of Holmes: Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett are adequately represented, but the rest of the section (too brief) is a scattershot itemization of a few movies. (I mean, does "Without a Clue" really warrant any mention at all other than as a comic anomaly?) Holmes iconography in general could really have stood a few more pages, since it has been so central to Holmes's continuing popularity.

And one other small regret: weirdly, Frederick Dorr Steele's illustrations grace the box and dust jackets, but he isn't represented nearly enough inside: it's nice to see his fine sequence of pictures for "The Creeping Man," but it's sad that his flawless portrait of Holmes on the cliff (from "The Lion's Mane") isn't here.

But these are cavils. For anyone (not just Sherlock junkies) interested in the Holmes cycle, this is the edition to have: it'll keep you company for a long time to come. I look forward to the concluding volume (with the four novels) next year!

There have been many many collections published over the years of the Sherlock Holmes canon. I think it is safe to say that this one surpasses them all. Leslie Klinger is considered one of the foremost Holmes authorities in the world. He not only provides a lucid and thorough introduction to the work but his forward tells the reader what the Victorian world was like at the time the works were published.
The stories themselves are treated with the utmost respect. No Bible thin paper quality here. The pages are thick and the type large and easily read. The text is written in column form with copious notes written for the general reader by Leslie Klinger appearing along side the text vs. footnotes at the bottom of the page. These notes provide in depth explanations of references in the text that may not be familiar to the modern reader. To make this volume an extra special treat are the numerous illustrations that are interspersed directly into the text at the location the illustration refers to. These are the original illustrations by Sidney Paget that appeared in the Strand Magazine or Frederick Dorr Steele in Collier's among many others. Vintage photographs appear throughout lending the tales an added level of realism. Mr. Klinger has also written articles to educate the reader such as the Boer War, the guns of Sherlock Holmes, swamp adders and various other topics pertaining to the stories.
These two volumes represent all the short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. In one year, the novels will appear in a separate volume. THE ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES is a superb work and should be the cornerstone of any home mystery library. It is truly a joy to read and marvelous to look at.

There's no question that William S. Baring-Gould's "Annotated Sherlock Holmes," now 37 years old, has long been the definitive guide to the Great Detective. I still recommend it to baby Sherlcokians. Now, however, Leslie Klinger has produced a NEW Annotated for THIS generation, and it's really quite wonderful. These are the first two volumes (the complete Doyle short stories) of what will be a three-volume masterwork (the third volume will hold the four novels). They come beautifully slipcased. The reproductions of the old illustrations are crisper and sharper than I've ever seen them. The terrific annotations to all 56 stories are not only very well done but are presented in color, making reading very easy. This set belongs on the shelf of every serious Sherlockian.

This two volume box edition would be a wonderful gift for the reader who loves the stories of Sherlock Holmes. There are many solid collections of these 56 tales by Arthur Conan Doyle, but if the reader is looking for explanations of the background and history of the Victorian age in which the stories are set, this is the edition for you.

This large oversize set is similiar in size to last year's "Far Side" collection of all of Gary Larsen's drawings. With nearly 1,900 pages, the annotations are placed alongside the text for quick reference along with some of the original illustations which accompanied those stories. And frankly, the Amazon price is a steal for an edition of this quality (think of the Library of America publications).

The reader should be aware that the four Sherlock Holmes novels (like "The Hound of the Basketvilles", "A Study In Scarlet", et al) are NOT in this edition --they will be published in a third volume next year. This new edition is more comprehensive than the two volume set of William Baring-Gould (1968) and far less bulky than the nine volume edition from Oxford University Press. The writing is clear and concise by the editor (Leslie Klinger) who has performed considerable research on the world of Sherlock Holmes. This is an edition that the reader will return to again and again on a cold winter's night.

Conan Doyle's fifty-six short stories are presented here by a master "Sherlockian". This means that the annotations assume that Sherlock Holmes really existed. This really gets on the nose at times, and I must say I was expecting something far more scholarly (i.e. Sherlock Holmes never existed, people!!)

That aside, the edition is a magnificent one if you can overlook the geeky aspect of it. The quality of the production is fantastic, with very good paper (cream coloured) and two-colour printing which is used to excellent effect. The photos and illustrations include (as far as I can tell), every single one of the Strand Magazine illustrations by Mr Paget, reproduced in stunning detail - I can make out details I never saw in any previous edition!

The stories are copiously annotated. Sometmes this is fantastically useful in setting the scene in a way that modern audiences might not be able to do. A good example is "The Noble Bachelor", which has annotations explaining that the Apache attack mentioned in the text was actually a real attack in New Mexico in 1881.

Alas, sometimes the annotations got a little too precious and "cute" for this particular reader. An example is Silver Blaze, which has an entire article speculating on whether Sherlock Holmes placed a bet on Silver Blaze's race (groan), while leaving out what I was looking forward to - an explanation of why and in what manner the racing detail in the story is "faulty" as Conan Doyle famously admitted. I suppose that would require too much "reality" for the Sherlockian conceit to bear...

Anyone wanting a much more scholarly approach to an annotated Sherlock Holmes would do well to look at the Oxford edition, which is considered definitive by Conan scholars (Although even here the annotators sometimes seem to cross the thin line into pure nerdy fantasy!) However, that edition has no illustrations at all, and is an exceedingly uninspiring and rather drab presentation.

(By the way - Whatever happened to the Holmesians?? Have their American cousins the Sherlockians completely taken over the field, with their boundless energy and seemingly limitless excess of time on their hands???)

Among my most-treasured books is a copy of Baring-Gould's _The Annotated Sherlock Holmes_, bought for $10 (!) a decade ago at Costco. His extensive annotations and commentary gave new depth to my readings of the Canon.

I am glad to say that Klinger's _New Annotated Sherlock Holmes_ is a more than worthy heir to Baring-Gould's pioneering effort. As others have noted, the production values are indeed superb; the complete collection of the Paget drawings (themselves worthy of the purchase) have never looked better. The price is a bargain for 1,900 pages and two volumes of high-quality printing. If you have any interest at all in the greatest detective of all time, this is a must-buy.

Superb typography and beautiful layout make this the most readable edition of the Sherlock Holmes short stories available.

However, while Klinger's annotations are useful and moderately interesting, they just aren't as much fun as the classic Baring-Gould collection. Baring-Gould's notes succeed in involving the reader in the "game" of Holmseian criticism while being amusing and informative. Klinger's, for some reason, don't.

A great edition if you want to read the stories. But not a replacement for the Baring-Gould edition.

If you've already read all the stories, this is a great set of books, and perhaps you might learn something new. If you're a new reader who is actually trying to read the stories as stories, this is a soul-crushing dissection that will suck all the joy out.

First the good - you can feel the love in these books. Large format, heavy, decent enough paper, the definitive Sidney Paget illustrations, extensive annotations, timelines, 'biographies' of Watson and Holmes, a clear obsession with the subject.

The downside is that same obsession. Each page is divided in half, with the inner half being the actual story, the outer half being the annotations. HALF. There is nearly as much annotation as story. Now imagine you're reading along and you see a little superscript '10' next to a word. My natural inclination is to glance at the annotation - the problem is you don't know whether it's crucial or worse than useless. It could tell you useful information such as every mention of the game of whist in the official Holmes Canon or the definition of a word that might not be in much use today, like 'whist'. It could be idle fan speculation such as 'Mister Blah speculates in his Holmesian analysis 'Maids in Deerskin Peril' that this maid was actually the long lost fifth cousin of Prof. Moriarity because she shares the same last name as his fourth cousin!' It could be bafflement that there was apparently no hotel in the town of Foochester where Holmes said there was in the story 'The Bunnies of the Foovilles'. Worst of all it could be pointing out actual factual errors by Holmes, like a barometer reading that Holmes seems to think would indicate fair weather but a meteorologist says means it should be raining already (and of course these are all written off as Watson's errors, which gets very tedious after a while). Or noting that 'Watson refers here to a story that by the chronology could not have taken place already because of x, y, and z'.

The reality is perhaps too easy: Arthur Conan Doyle cared only slightly for Holmesian consistency and didn't spend much time worrying about it. When you get obsessed fans trying to explain or retcon some inconsistency it's bound to be a horrible sight, and these are brought out equally with the genuinely useful annotations. When you glance over you have no way of telling which it will be in advance.

I read the stories as a child and loved them, and am trying to re-read them again, but this obsessive, nitpicking nerdgassing is destroying all my love. Imagine you're reading Wizard of Oz while little text bubbles are popping up describing everything wrong with the story.

Against all my training, I am teaching myself to completely ignore all the annotations (and thus half the page) and perhaps will go back later and re-read the comments.

So again, if you've already read all the books, these are excellent. If not, read a collection that consists of only the stories themselves first.

Like many Holmes fans, I was looking forward to having this new annotated edition of the short stories of the canon in my hands but I must say I got quite disappointed for two very simple reasons. Firstly it seems to me that most of the notes are not a significant contribution or add nothing new to the notes appearing in Baring-Gould's previous annotated edition (Le Carré's introduction, so much advertised, is disappointingly short and says little more than the usual reviews appearing in book covers). Secondly, the production quality of the books leaves much to be desired. They haven't got a sewn binding and the thinness of the paper, together with the thickness of the volumes, make the book look like a phone directory. Absolutely nothing to do with the wonderful quality of Baring-Gould's edition and its marvellous endpapers. One thing more I'd like to add: why is Baring-Gould's "personal chronology" of the stories described as a mistake? We SH fans like to play "the game" and these "whims" are certainly delicious, perhaps an act of learned love for these wonderful stories. Klinger's approach pretends to me more serious, more scholarly. Poor Holmes, if its fate is to be analyzed by the thorough spectacles of brainy university professors. If you don't have Baring-Gould's edition go and find it in 2nd hand bookstores. Then if you want more, buy this one and compare. As we say in Spanish, "no hay color".

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes is a hefty two volumed slipcased edition with a promise of a third volume still to come. When complete, all of the Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels will be fully annotated, and the world of 221-B Baker Street and its denizens will be more intriguing than ever.

As with most annotated books, it helps to be already familiar with the actual stories so that you can focus on the annotations. Otherwise, you continually lose the thread of the story as you get sidetracked on one fascinating note after another. And with Klinger's annotations, every note is captivating and lets the reader see new vistas of material.

Conan Doyle, in common with J.R.R. Tolkien among other greats, was able to create characters and worlds who are so believable that many readers accept their reality. This is part of the charm of Klinger's annotations, that he accepts the reality of Holmes and Watson and solemnly analyzes their movements and other activities as if they really occurred (which of course every Sherlockian knows they did!) Besides the notes themselves, Klinger also provides short essays analyzing enduring puzzles of the stories, like what sort of snake was "The Speckled Band" and how many times Watson was married.

This, with the third volume which is promised for 2005, will be absolutely essential for every student/fan of Holmes and Watson. If you are an absolute novice, I'd suggest you first read the stories in an unannotated version, then after you get the plots down, you can absorb and enjoy the additional pleasures of Klinger's annotations.