“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”
–Sherlock Holmes, “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”

It is somewhat of a consensus around the Walrus office, or at least whichever part of that office Paul Isaacs and I happen to be in at a given time, that Sherlock Holmes is tops. This is one of those hyperbolic statements that sounds playful and ridiculous, but which is not. I believe some call this Birony.

The truth is that Sherlock Holmes is just about the best company a person could have. (He’s also a great instructor in the art of reasoning; were we all to study at his feet, the world would be a better, and slightly cooler, place.) But Holmes has had the misfortune of what we might call the public domain treatment. This phenomenon happens when a book is no one’s property and thus anyone can release it in basically any form at any time. This leads to two things: 1) a wider, often less-expensive dissemination of the texts, which in the case of Holmes is excellent, for people tend to enjoy the stories, but which in the case of Hard Times is certainly pernicious and potentially disastrous to the book’s public conception (average twenty-first century reader: not so much with the activist Dickens); and 2) a proliferation of ugly design (see: everything by Dover Thrift Editions) which is often so prevalent as to render the book forever hideous in the reading public’s mind. (I should note that it’s great that Dover makes very affordable books, and I don’t criticize their enterprise there. I’m not even asking them to make the books beautiful. Just less ugly.)

But occasionally public domain affords something wonderful, and the past few years have been kind to Sherlock fans in this regard. First there was Norton’s beautiful, slip-cased, annotated editions of the stories and the novels. And this month Penguin releases a collection of eight mass-market sized paperbacks, dividing the work into its original volumes, including the novels—A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four, The Hound of the Baskervilles, and The Valley of Fear—and the story collections—The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, and His Last Bow and The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes.

(I should note here that, as Jon Lellenberg points out in the comments below, The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes is still protected by copyright in the US. I hadn’t investigated the particularities, and am thankful for the further information.)

The Norton collections present Holmes’s world in incredible detail, with 800 illustrations and countless footnotes offering Victorian context and connecting the works themselves. The new Penguin series does something quite different. Instead of reminding us of the intense learnedness of Holmes and Conan Doyle (nor showing us how rich and nuanced their shared space is), it paints the tales with the broad strokes of genre fiction, casting each volume as one in a series of old-fashioned adventure, horror, or mystery yarns. Consider The Hound of the Baskervilles, which features an almost ridiculous number of suspense tropes. Man with gun: check. Howling dog: check. Wind-blown trees: check. Dark, spooky house: check.

As an editorial design, The Hound of the Baskervilles succeeds because it mimics what the novel does. It takes a handful of what are now clichés, and employs them so masterfully that they remind us of why they were good enough to be repeated by generations of writers in the first place. In drawing on the campy history of genre paperback design, these new Penguins reflect the legacy of the stories contained inside, playfully suggesting the ways in which Conan Doyle’s work has been stolen, echoed, re-imagined, and reiterated over the course of the last century.

The new Penguins also stand in perfect counterpoint to the Norton edition. Taken as a group, the two sets demonstrate exactly what it is about Holmes that has captured readers since A Study in Scarlet. The Norton set is the method and precision—perfectly recreated illustrations, endless meticulous footnotes—while the Penguin series is the fantastic and seedy—blood, moustaches, and feral dogs. Holmes endures because he contains all of this. He is both a brilliant scientist, and a drug-addled waste, a man whose mind is pure machine and whose life is pure stage. He offers readers both worlds, tightly contained: the stories are undeniably smart, but they’re also exhilarating on a basic adrenal level, a combination that one wishes were more common than it is.

As my friend Sean likes to point out, there is pleasure to be taken in having a book in one’s pocket, and these new Holmes titles are ideal candidates. They’re also another sign that Penguin is absolutely ruling the school when it comes to issuing extremely beautiful paperbacks. Consider their recent Great Loves and Great Journeys series, each of which repackages a pre-existing text in a mass-market-sized paperback with a heavy matte cover. In an era when people seem to be less and less interested in what’s happening with new literature, maybe a return to the past isn’t a bad idea.

More in The Shelf | Sphere: Related Content | Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 10:38 am. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.