'The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' is Published

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twelve stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his famous detective and illustrated by Sidney Paget.

These are the first of the Sherlock Holmes short stories, originally published as single stories in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 to June 1892. The book was published in England on 14 October 1892 by George Newnes Ltd and in a US Edition on 15 October by Harper. The initial combined print run was 14,500 copies.

The book was banned in the Soviet Union in 1929 for the occultism[citation needed] of its author, although the book shows few to no signs of such material. Later, the embargo was lifted.

Bell was impressed by the character of Sherlock Holmes, but also praised Doyle as a ‘born story teller’: ‘He has had the wit to devise excellent plots, interesting complications; he tells them in honest Saxon-English with directness and pith; and, above all his other merits, his stories are absolutely free from padding.’ Doyle, he said, ‘knows how delicious brevity is, how everything tends to be too long, and he has given us stories that we can read at a sitting between dinner and coffee, and we have not a chance to forget the beginning before we reach the end.’ Of the stories themselves, he said: ‘One man will enjoy “The Red-Headed League”; another “The Blue Carbuncle”; for the average reader “The Speckled Band” has special charms. The story of “The Five Orange Pips” will probably come home to the American, and “The Noble Bachelor” will interest Mayfair. In “The Engineer’s Thumb” Mr Holmes has less to do, but he does is done with his usual directness of action, guided by simplicity of method. Not one of the twelve is a failure, and the handsome volume in which they have been collected will be a prize to all those young and old who are not ashamed to read good stories.’