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The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
A stunning new Folio Society collection of Arthur Conan Doyle’s most compelling cases, The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is given a contemporary twist with Max Löffler’s unsettling illustrations.
‘You must have started early and yet you had a good drive in a dogcart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.’ So declares literature’s best-loved detective upon greeting a new client in the sitting room of 221b Baker Street. Amazed by his powers of deduction, the stranger reveals her story and a new adventure commences.
‘Twice after his career had been definitely terminated by the author, Sherlock Holmes was brought back to fictional life, so avid was the appetite of the public for the narratives of the solution of crime by minute deductive reasoning.’
- New York Times
PRODUCTION DETAILS
Quarter-bound in blocked cloth with blocked cloth case sides
Set in Laurentian with Clarendon display
280 pages
Frontispiece and 8 black & white integrated illustrations
Blocked slipcase
9½˝ x 6¼˝
A new collection of cracking cases
‘My dear Doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk. We are spies in an enemy’s country.’
The brilliant detective shows off his incredible powers of deduction in this new collection of ten perennially popular cases chosen from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes has become the most lauded sleuth in literature, his capricious character kept on a level by his unflappable assistant, Dr Watson. Together, the pair investigates the insalubrious environs of Victorian London to solve a string of complex crimes. We begin with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ – the only Sherlock Holmes story to feature his female adversary Irene Adler – and reach a thrilling finale that features a duel with his nemesis Professor Moriarty in ‘The Final Problem’. In between, Holmes must foil a bank heist in ‘The Red-Headed League’, locate a missing race horse in ‘Silver Blaze’, and deduce how a man died in a locked room with just his innocent wife present in ‘The Crooked Man’.
A series of stunning new illustrations
As winner of the Book Illustration Competition, hosted annually by Folio and the House of Illustration, Max Löffler was commissioned for the edition. His trompe l’oeil style, which creates optical illusions through illustration, adds menacing realism to the nine images and a contemporary twist to the tales. The selection is introduced by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Dirda. As a member of the oldest Sherlock Holmes society, the Baker Street Irregulars, his involvement in the edition was elementary.
CONTENTS
A Scandal in Bohemia
The Red-Headed League
The Man with the Twisted Lip
The Speckled Band
The Copper Beeches
Silver Blaze
The Musgrave Ritual
The Crooked Man
The Greek Interpreter
The Final Problem
ABOUT ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) is the creator of the world’s most famous detective in literature, Sherlock Holmes. Born in Scotland, Conan Doyle attended Edinburgh University and took a degree as bachelor of medicine, but supplemented his income by writing short stories. His first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, was first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, but was not particularly successful. Neither was the second novel, The Sign of Four (published in 1890), but his Holmes short stories, published in 1891 in the newly founded Strand Magazine, made him instantly famous. Apart from the 56 Holmes short stories, there were four novels: the two mentioned above as well as The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) and The Valley of Fear (1915). Amongst his other great characters are Brigadier Gerard, a Hussar officer in the French Army during the Napoleonic Wars, and Professor Challenger, a tough explorer and protagonist of several short stories and novels, most notably The Lost World (1912). Conan Doyle died in East Sussex in 1930.
ABOUT MICHAEL DIRDA
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning literary journalist, a weekly books columnist for the Washington Post, and the author of five collections of essays: Readings (2000), Bound to Please (2005), Book by Book (2006), Classics for Pleasure (2007) and Browsings (2015). He has also written the memoir An Open Book (2003) and On Conan Doyle (2012), which received an Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America. His current project is a reconsideration of popular fiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has written introductions The Great Gatsby (2013), Dune (2016), East of Eden (2017) and Atlas Shrugged (2018) for The Folio Society.
ABOUT MAX LÖFFLER
Max Löffler was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, and studied graphic design at the Design faculty of the Hochschule Darmstadt. His artworks are mostly created using digital techniques and he has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Silver ADC Award, a Joseph Binder Distinction and a Gold 3x3 Award. In 2018 Löffler’s images for The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes won the 2018 annual Book Illustration Competition, run by House of Illustration and The Folio Society.
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