A Treasury and a Mystery

Robert Frost wrote “good fences make good neighbors.” I think good books make good neighbors.

One of our neighbors recently passed on to me A Treasury of Sherlock Holmes. I already have three different editions of this book, so why did I accept another? Because, as a former pastor of mine said while accepting a slug of Bailey’s Irish Cream in his coffee at 10 a.m., “I’m never one to discourage generosity.”

I’ve written about this interesting anthology before, as you can read by clicking here.

But there’s a little mystery that goes with the edition I just acquired, and maybe you can solve it.

The book was published by Hanover House, Garden City, New York. But it’s exactly the same, page for page, as the edition pictured above published by Doubleday & Co. It’s also the same as another edition I have, published by the International Collectors Library. My third copy is a book club edition from Nelson Doubleday Nelson, on thinner paper but paginated identically.

In each edition, no matter the publisher, the second sentence of Adrian Conan Doyle’s introduction begins, “When our old friends at Hanover House . . . .”

Were Hanover House, the International Collectors Library, and Doubleday all the same company? Perhaps the answer is elementary.