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.
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 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”
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 [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.
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| 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.
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| 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”.
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| August 30, 2007 | 1.7 |
Fixed quoting in “The Abbey Grange”.
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| 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”.
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| August 12, 2007 | 1.5 |
Added forgotten left-quote in “The Red-Headed League”.
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| 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.
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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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