The complete Sherlock Holmes


“When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee.” — “A Study in Scarlet”

The complete canon

From this page you can read or download the complete Sherlock Holmes stories. I've built the files below from the now copyright-free texts as a fun excerise in order to learn about LaTeX, Typesetting and Typography in general.
Please note that since copyright laws may vary greatly from country to country, you should spend a minute glancing over the next section in order to determine if it's legal for yourself to download the texts into the country you're currently accessing this page from.

Copyright issues

Whether you may download these texts is decided by your local copyright regulation laws:

United States

If U.S. copyright law applies to you, you may download neither the “Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes”—and the short stories contained in it—nor “The complete Canon” at the beginning of the list (since it also contains the case-book). You might want to take a look at the “U.S. edition” canon instead: This contains everything except the case-book. By the way: For the case-book, the copyright will expire between 2016 and 2023 (see sherlockian.net).

Europe

For all countries in the European Union, copyright seems to expire 70 years after the author's death, thus it should be legal to download all the texts from there (see the Online Books Page).

Canada

The copyrights expired 1980 (see sherlockian.net).
If in doubt, please consult the Online Books Page. It contains a lot of references and examples, and a mass of links to copyright information for many countries.

File format selection

Select PDF for printing, HTML for on-screen-reading or ASCII Text for other purposes.
Choose from DIN-A4 or Letter paper size.
1-sided output format has the page number always in the same position, for 2-sided output the page number position alternates between left and right and the margins are adapted accordingly. The “reverse side margins” option puts the larger margin on the page bounding edge instead of the outer side for easier binding.
Notes:
  • If you're printing the stories using Adobe's Acrobat, you should try setting the “Page Scaling” option to “None” in order to have a correctly scaled layout.
  • I've noticed that printing PDFs from Safari 3 on a Mac for some reason shifts the page content to the right. Saving the file to disk and opening it directly corrects this problem.
  • Nothing's perfect. If you stumble across any problems, spelling errors or just want to send feedback, please send mail to Christoph(dot)Ender(at)spellbreaker(dot)org (sorry for the spam obfuscation).
The CanonPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Complete Canon5,192,854 Bytes
The Canon — U.S. edition4,680,190 Bytes
CollectionsPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes742,518 Bytes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes642,436 Bytes
The Return of Sherlock Holmes1,780,355 Bytes
His Last Bow518,293 Bytes
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes615,597 Bytes
NovelsPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
A Study In Scarlet349,646 Bytes
The Sign of the Four334,923 Bytes
The Hound of the Baskervilles432,532 Bytes
The Valley of Fear426,771 Bytes
Short stories
The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
A Scandal in Bohemia115,154 Bytes
The Red-Headed League109,152 Bytes
A Case of Identity93,461 Bytes
The Boscombe Valley Mystery119,501 Bytes
The Five Orange Pips107,193 Bytes
The Man with the Twisted Lip102,741 Bytes
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle108,215 Bytes
The Adventure of the Speckled Band106,498 Bytes
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb108,589 Bytes
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor110,823 Bytes
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet107,407 Bytes
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches113,803 Bytes
The Memoirs of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
Silver Blaze108,876 Bytes
Yellow Face83,607 Bytes
The Stockbroker's Clerk100,798 Bytes
The “Gloria Scott”98,505 Bytes
The Musgrave Ritual93,239 Bytes
The Reigate Puzzle97,173 Bytes
The Crooked Man80,913 Bytes
The Resident Patient93,565 Bytes
The Greek Interpreter103,524 Bytes
The Naval Treaty125,269 Bytes
The Final Problem95,752 Bytes
The Return of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Empty House107,876 Bytes
The Norwood Builder117,750 Bytes
The Dancing Men1,111,951 Bytes
The Solitary Cyclist99,625 Bytes
The Priory School121,690 Bytes
Black Peter97,812 Bytes
Charles Augustus Milverton94,013 Bytes
The Six Napoleons106,393 Bytes
The Three Students87,701 Bytes
The Golden Pince-Nez104,606 Bytes
The Missing Three-Quarter106,398 Bytes
The Abbey Grange108,507 Bytes
The Second Stain119,286 Bytes
His Last BowPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
Wisteria Lodge140,631 Bytes
The Cardboard Box111,267 Bytes
The Red Circle111,533 Bytes
The Bruce-Partington Plans118,025 Bytes
The Dying Detective86,512 Bytes
Lady Frances Carfax100,840 Bytes
The Devil's Foot106,292 Bytes
His Last Bow90,421 Bytes
The Case-Book of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Illustrious Client109,159 Bytes
The Blanched Soldier96,633 Bytes
The Mazarin Stone83,084 Bytes
The Three Gables96,631 Bytes
The Sussex Vampire87,949 Bytes
The Three Garridebs93,369 Bytes
Thor Bridge109,962 Bytes
The Creeping Man89,352 Bytes
The Lion's Mane98,637 Bytes
The Veiled Lodger67,662 Bytes
Shoscombe Old Place78,940 Bytes
The Retired Colourman90,083 Bytes
“… the words had a most magical effect, for the window instantly slammed down, and within a minute the door was unbarred and open.” — “The Sign of Four”

[The Royal Marine Light Infantry sergeant] … clicked his heels together, raised his hand in a salute, and was gone. — “A Study in Scarlet”

Change Log

Date Version Description
December 1, 2009 1.19
Added “reverse-side-margin” two-page layout. In this layout, the inner margin is larger than the outer for easier binding of the pages.
August 27, 2009 1.18
Fixed two more typos in “Silver Blaze”, thanks again to Josh Martens.
August 10, 2009 1.17
Fixed typo in “Silver Blaze”, thanks to Josh Martens.
July 1, 2009 1.16
Fixed typo in “The Final Problem” and re-added lost images to “The Dancing Men”, thanks to Josh Martens.
June 4, 2009 1.15
Fixed typo in “A Study in Scarlet”.
May 21, 2009 1.14
Added prefaces to “His Last Bow” and to the “Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes”, fixed links in table of contents.
March 30, 2009 1.13
Fixed typo in "The Crooked Man”.
January 28, 2008 1.12
Fixed PDF-specific table of contents, used Yannis Haralambous' baroque initials from the yfonts package for the story openings.
September 29, 2007 1.11
Corrected an error in CROO and added the version number to the small print after the title page.
September 20, 2007 1.10
Added spacing between subsequent quotes in the PDFs, fixed typos in GLOR and REIG and a quote in MUSG and superfluous empty paragraphs.
September 10, 2007 1.9
Corrected typos in “The Yellow Face” and “The Stockbroker's Clerk”.
September 9, 2007 1.8
Switched to old style figures and fixed a typo in “Silver Blaze”.
August 30, 2007 1.7
Fixed quoting in “The Abbey Grange”.
August 18, 2007 1.6
Fixed list in the HTML issue of “The Five Orange Pips” and a superfluous dot in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”.
August 12, 2007 1.5
Added forgotten left-quote in “The Red-Headed League”.
July 23, 2007 1.4
Fixed letter-layout in a number of places and re-built this index webpage, which now allows much easier access to the 2-sided variants.
June 11, 2007 1.3
Corrected a typo in “The Devil's Foot”.
June 10, 2007 1.2
Re-built the print-space in the letter-sized PDFs to better suit the paper format. Added two-sided PDF output in the respective A4- and Letter-specific directories, not on the print story index yet.
June 7, 2007 1.1
Added plain text output, re-built the index web page and archived all changes pre-dating this year.
June 3, 2007 1.0
Finally finished converting the last texts, did the proofreading, got rid of the last formatting issues and set up the new table of contents. This marks the end of the text conversion and the release of the the first plain collection.
April 14, 2007
Thoroughly proof-read all the current 48 out of 60 stories, eliminating approximately a hundred spelling or formatting errors in the process. Now, only two things remain: Adapting “The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes” and creating a corrected table of contents.
The background image is a 100%, 1200dpi crop from chapter III of A Study in Scarlet and was rendered with Ghostscript via “gs -r1200 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=png16m -dBATCH -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -sOutputFile=%d.png stud.pdf”.
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