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, 2-sided output alternates between left and right side of the page.
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 notied 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 Canon5,192,859 Bytes
The Canon — U.S. edition4,680,195 Bytes
CollectionsPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes742,519 Bytes
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes642,441 Bytes
The Return of Sherlock Holmes1,780,356 Bytes
His Last Bow518,294 Bytes
The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes615,598 Bytes
NovelsPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
A Study In Scarlet349,647 Bytes
The Sign of the Four334,924 Bytes
The Hound of the Baskervilles432,532 Bytes
The Valley of Fear426,772 Bytes
Short stories
The Adventures of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
A Scandal in Bohemia115,155 Bytes
The Red-Headed League109,153 Bytes
A Case of Identity93,315 Bytes
The Boscombe Valley Mystery119,502 Bytes
The Five Orange Pips107,194 Bytes
The Man with the Twisted Lip102,742 Bytes
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle108,216 Bytes
The Adventure of the Speckled Band106,499 Bytes
The Adventure of the Engineer's Thumb108,590 Bytes
The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor110,824 Bytes
The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet107,408 Bytes
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches113,804 Bytes
The Memoirs of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
Silver Blaze108,881 Bytes
Yellow Face83,608 Bytes
The Stockbroker's Clerk100,651 Bytes
The “Gloria Scott”98,506 Bytes
The Musgrave Ritual93,240 Bytes
The Reigate Puzzle97,174 Bytes
The Crooked Man80,759 Bytes
The Resident Patient93,566 Bytes
The Greek Interpreter103,525 Bytes
The Naval Treaty125,270 Bytes
The Final Problem95,753 Bytes
The Return of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Empty House107,877 Bytes
The Norwood Builder117,751 Bytes
The Dancing Men1,111,952 Bytes
The Solitary Cyclist99,626 Bytes
The Priory School121,691 Bytes
Black Peter97,813 Bytes
Charles Augustus Milverton93,870 Bytes
The Six Napoleons106,394 Bytes
The Three Students87,702 Bytes
The Golden Pince-Nez104,607 Bytes
The Missing Three-Quarter106,399 Bytes
The Abbey Grange108,508 Bytes
The Second Stain119,287 Bytes
His Last BowPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
Wisteria Lodge140,632 Bytes
The Cardboard Box111,268 Bytes
The Red Circle111,534 Bytes
The Bruce-Partington Plans118,026 Bytes
The Dying Detective86,359 Bytes
Lady Frances Carfax100,841 Bytes
The Devil's Foot106,293 Bytes
His Last Bow90,421 Bytes
The Case-Book of Sherlock HolmesPDF, DIN-A4, 1-sided
The Illustrious Client109,160 Bytes
The Blanched Soldier96,634 Bytes
The Mazarin Stone83,085 Bytes
The Three Gables96,479 Bytes
The Sussex Vampire87,950 Bytes
The Three Garridebs93,370 Bytes
Thor Bridge109,963 Bytes
The Creeping Man89,353 Bytes
The Lion's Mane98,638 Bytes
The Veiled Lodger67,663 Bytes
Shoscombe Old Place78,789 Bytes
The Retired Colourman90,084 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
July 1, 2009 1.16
Fixed typo in “The Final Problem”, 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.
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