The complete Canon was published with a vast apparatus of notes under the title The Annotated Sherlock Holmes (Clarkson N. Potter, 1967; a British edition followed in 1968 from John Murray, and there is also a one-volume reprint). Its editor was William S. Baring-Gould (1913–67), whose death while the book was still in proof prevented the correction of some errors and imperfections. Its two volumes (688 pages in the first, 824 pages in the second) provide hundreds of illustrations from many sources — often murkily reproduced — and marginal notes explaining Victorian terms, pointing the reader to related passages in other stories, and providing a wealth of background and enrichment. In addition, there are nineteen chapters on general subjects, all the editor’s work: on Sherlockian parodies, on films, on Watson, on the snake in “The Speckled Band,” on Watson’s wounds, on Watson’s marriages, on the Great Hiatus, and so on. These chapters are interspersed with the stories, in facsimile from the John Murray collected edition, arranged in the order in which Baring-Gould deemed them to have taken place. Thus “The ‘Gloria Scott’” comes first and “His Last Bow” last; the first volume goes as far as The Sign of the Four. Constant recourse to the table of contents is unavoidable.
The Annotated holds unswervingly to the pretense that what Sherlockians do when they exercise their imaginations about Holmes is sober biographical scholarship. Baring-Gould also included, without distinguishing it from other kinds of knowledge, biographical detail that he had invented for Holmes in his own Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, published five years earlier. The result can be cloying; the pervasive fiction slights Doyle and limits the book’s use for some kinds of study. Nevertheless, for almost forty years Baring-Gould’s enormous industry and range of knowledge were agreed to more than compensate for his quirks. The Annotated had an enormous influence on the spread of interest in Sherlock Holmes in the 1970s, and was indispensable for a generation of Sherlockian scholars.
A very different annotated edition appeared in 1993 from Oxford University Press: The Oxford Sherlock Holmes in nine volumes, under the general editorship of Owen Dudley Edwards, a professor of history at the University of Edinburgh. “Given Conan Doyle’s general lack of close supervision of the Holmes texts, it is not always easy to determine his final wishes,” he wrote in the “General Introduction.” Edwards edited three of the nine volumes himself; two were done by Christopher Roden, two by Richard Lancelyn Green, and two by W.W. Robson. In each case the editor of a volume contributed a solid introduction, with context and detail about how the stories came to be written; provided explanatory notes; and, most important, edited the text, making changes to produce a readable but also authoritative version. Some of the alterations are mildly surprising (moving “The Cardboard Box” out of His Last Bow, where it has traditionally sat, and into The Memoirs, where it made its brief first bow in 1893). Others are positively startling, as when Edwards turns the familiar if puzzling reference to “the Long Island cave mystery” in “The Red Circle” into “the Long Island cove mystery” on the grounds that there are no caves on Long Island, New York, and Doyle’s handwriting was ambiguous anyway. Whether or not one applauds all the editors’ decisions, the Oxford edition is enormously useful as a reference about textual variations and similar matters. Many of its notes also illuminate connections between Doyle’s own life and allusions that he drops into the stories. It can be tediously exhaustive (“Hampshire: a southern English county much loved by ACD”) but it can also be quickly helpful. Although some notes do address the lives of the characters, such as speculation about whether Watson had returned to medical practice at the time of “The Illustrious Client,” the Oxford editors do not indulge in make-believe biography as Baring-Gould had done. They are literary critics writing about literary characters and the author who created them, rather as one would expect from such a publisher. Also as one would expect, the books are clear and comfortable to read. The editorial notes are at the end of the volume rather than on the same pages as the text, and are signalled by modest asterisks. And each volume is compact, little larger than pocket-sized. (A paperback edition followed the original hardbacks, and Oxford is in the process of reissuing all nine volumes in its World’s Classics paperback series.) If there was one criticism generally agreed on by early users of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, it was that it appeared entirely without illustrations.
The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, edited by Los Angeles lawyer Leslie S. Klinger, took a very different attitude and addressed a very different audience, being intended mostly for dedicated Sherlockians and published in small quantities by a specialized firm, Gasogene Books of Indianapolis. Its ten paperback volumes — nine for the usual nine volumes of the Canon and a tenth for the “Apocrypha,” writings by Arthur Conan Doyle with a less authoritative connection to Sherlock Holmes — appeared over more than a decade, the first being dated 1998 and the last 2009. They include only a small number of illustrations, but in other respects the Reference Library has everything for which readers had come to rely on the Baring-Gould Annotated, with the further merit of presenting the stories in a conventional order. Klinger uses some of Baring-Gould’s notes and adds hundreds referring to other sources, including the thirty years’ worth of Sherlockian scholarship that had intervened as well as the ninth edition (1875–89) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a library full of other reference works. Although quoting at length from such works, Klinger frequently adds his own perceptions as well. He was more interested than Baring-Gould had been in the possibilities opened by textual criticism; he presents what he called “my own version” of the text, based primarily on what had appeared in the Strand, and includes many notes about variant readings and the known manuscripts. The books are not good as reading copies, their pages dense with small type, but for scholars in search of Sherlockian understanding they are indispensable, and have largely rendered Baring-Gould obsolete.
A landmark in Sherlockian publishing came in 2005 with the appearance of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, volumes I and II, slipcased together and weighing nearly as much as a piece of furniture. The two blue-bound volumes dealt with the fifty-six Holmes short stories, with a red-bound volume III following in 2006 and addressing the four novels. These too were the work of Leslie S. Klinger, whose Reference Library was almost complete by the time the New Annotated appeared.
“There are significant differences between this edition and Baring-Gould’s classic Annotated Sherlock Holmes,” Klinger insisted in a note that begins on page 1841 of his volume II. “Baring-Gould emphasized the ‘chronology’ of the stories,” he points out, whereas Klinger relegates most questions of what happened when to a chronological table, “The Life and Times of Sherlock Holmes,” appended to volume I (and including year-by-year highlights of Arthur Conan Doyle’s life and historical events as well as the cases and happenings in Holmes’s career). In keeping with his lack of interest in chronological puzzles, Klinger again keeps the stories in a predictable order. Large numbers of his notes reproduce material from the Reference Library word for word, but for the convenience of a larger and more general readership, he cuts out a great deal of specialized Sherlockian material and emphasizes Victorian life, geography, and technical terms. “The Golden Pince-Nez,” for example, has forty notes in the Reference Library volume for The Return of Sherlock Holmes and just twenty-one in the New Annotated. Sherlockian readers of the former are given three technical paragraphs about the likelihood and identity of a “red leech”; general readers of the latter get three brief sentences. They are altogether spared a note listing possible identifications of Yoxley Old Place with several existing houses in Suffolk, and also do not get to read Klinger’s three paragraphs about the availability of a “spirit-lamp” at 221B Baker Street.
The New Annotated follows the layout introduced by Baring-Gould, with notes in the outer margins of the pages (and long white spaces where nothing strikes the editor as worthy of annotation). For many of the stories there are separate brief essays on contentious or interesting topics, such as “The Rules of Rugby” to clarify “The Missing Three-Quarter,” but one thirty-page introductory essay, “The World of Sherlock Holmes,” takes the place of Baring-Gould’s