The Complete Novels and Stories, Bantam Classics (two volumes)
All four novels and all fifty-six stories, in two fat paperbacks.
The canon is the thing every version is arguing with, and the cheapest way to have all of it is two mass-market paperbacks.
You want every Holmes story there is, in two inexpensive paperbacks, and you are happy to read without footnotes.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: everything Conan Doyle wrote about Holmes: four novels and fifty-six short stories, split across two volumes.
Changes: nothing in the text. There are no notes to speak of; this is the canon with the lights on and nobody explaining it.
Whose story is it?
Holmes’s, told almost entirely by Watson — which is the arrangement every later version has to decide whether to keep.
How much time does it ask?
Two Bantam Classics mass-market paperbacks: Volume I is 1,088 pages, Volume II is 768. Every text in them is also free to read at Project Gutenberg.
Bantam Classics, two mass-market volumes, on sale since November 1986. Volume II holds The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Valley of Fear and The Case-Book.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Read free — Project Gutenberg · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
Common questions
How many Sherlock Holmes stories are there?
Sixty: four novels and fifty-six short stories, written by Arthur Conan Doyle and published between 1887 and 1927. Bantam's two-volume Complete Novels and Stories holds all of them — Volume I runs 1,088 pages and Volume II 768.
Is Sherlock Holmes in the public domain?
In the United States, yes — the whole canon. That is why every text is free to read at Project Gutenberg, and why paid editions compete on notes, introductions and price rather than on access.
More versions: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford World’s Classics (2025) · The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oxford World’s Classics (2023) · The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, ed. Leslie S. Klinger