Toronto Public Library Arthur Conan Doyle Collection
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The Arthur Conan Doyle Collection

Curator's Showcase - discovery at your fingertips

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Explore a selection of digitized treasures from the Toronto Public Library's Special Collections. Virtually turn the pages, zoom in on the images, and find related texts, images and sounds.

   
 

The room is open from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and by appointment,
but its contents can be used any time the library is open in the Special Collections reading room.


The Arthur Conan Doyle Room


The Toronto Reference Library has one of the world's foremost collections of library materials devoted to the life and work of Arthur Conan Doyle. Much of the collection, of course, is devoted to Doyle's most famous character, Sherlock Holmes. The Collection is housed in a room evoking 221B Baker Street, where people can browse along open shelves in a manner unusual in a special collection.

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The Hound of the Baskervilles; Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, 1902Nearly all the collection is accessible through the library's on-line catalogue; there is also a large subject index, still on cards, covering the secondary sources in great detail.



Doyle wrote much
Title page of Die Vergessene Weltmore than the Sherlock Holmes stories for which he is most famous.

In addition to other literary genres, he wrote extensively on spiritualism, true crime, history, and current issues of the day.





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The library collects different editions of Doyle's works, from the first to the most recent, along with simplified versions, translations, and adaptations to stage and screen. We also collect parodies, pastiches and any works in any medium that use Doyle's stories or characters. The most popular character by far, of course, is Sherlock Holmes, but in recent years Doyle himself made a surprising number of appearances in fictional works.
Bookcover of Detective Comics

We collect secondary material, such as critical, bibliographical, and biographical studies, on all the above areas.

Both primary and secondary material is published by university presses, commercial publishers, individuals, the many societies devoted to Sherlock Holmes, and the one society devoted to Arthur Conan Doyle.





Publications

Publications sponsored by the library relating to Arthur Conan Doyle are available from the Special Collections Centre.

Special Collections Centre Publications



Updated on: December 28, 2007




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