The Selected Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

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.

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.

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.