When Close is Good Enough

I love facsimile editions.

Even though I don’t have a collector gene that causes me to acquire a lot of first editions of rare or significant books (although I own a few), I enjoy the experience of reading a treasured book in an edition that looks just the one the first readers would have read.

I’m happy to have in my library facsimiles of the Beeton’s Christmas Annual  appearance of A Study in Scarlet and the first book edition of The Sign of Four. And, like many Sherlockians, I have multiple books reprinting the old Strand magazines with Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve found these facsimile editions not only fun to read, but useful for research on variant wordings.

For example, did you ever notice that it’s Baker-street not Baker Street in the Holmes stories as published in  The Strand? It is, and that usage was picked up in the first book publication The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by George Newnes in 1982.

I know that because I recently picked up a boxed set of Adventures and Memoirs in facsimile editions. These paperback volumes were published by A&W Visual Library in 1975. I often re-read the Canon in my facsimiles of the Strand, but next time around I plan to encounter the first stories just as the first readers of these books did.