Handwritten Page of Sherlock Holmes Manuscript Sold for $423,000

Unbelievably intelligent Sherlock Holmes seems expensive! The original handwritten page of Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles was auctioned for $423,000 (over ₹3 crores) in the United States. The page is titled ‘Chapter XIII- Fixing the Nets’, which was purchased by a private buyer by Heritage Auctions in Dallas in the US state of Texas. The manuscript was in excellent condition. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the stories in 1902. The chapter describes Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson talking about a murder on the moor and arresting a suspect. The length of the page is 20cm by 33cm.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was the one who revived the character of Sherlock Holmes in a 1902 novel following a fictional detective who was killed eight years earlier. This page is one of the 185 pages parts of the original manuscript of the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. They were provided to dealers as part of the novel’s great publicity campaign.

Many of the pages were destroyed over time because Doyle used acidic paper to write the manuscript. Only 37 pages survived today. A Heritage spokesperson was mentioned that “After killing off his popular character Sherlock Holmes in 1894, Doyle brought him back eight years later in The Hound of the Baskervilles, a book that has proved to be one of the more popular of the series.”The spokesperson further said, “To promote the book and the return of Holmes, the American publisher, McClure, Phillips & Company (New York) asked Doyle for the original manuscript, and mounted an elaborate publicity campaign for the book by breaking up the pages and offering them one by one to dealers who purchased copies.”

They stated that “Unfortunately, due to the fact that this particular manuscript was written on highly acidic paper, and the individual pages were mounted with equally acidic backing material, most of the pages used in the promotion have not survived either their framing or their display conditions. Only a tiny percentage exists today, and few are in as good condition as this particular leaf.”