Reading these aloud to Tara. Fun to revisit them! Tough to do all the voices....

Are you a complete nerd? Do you read detective stories and come away confused by the details, wondering just what all of Holmes' offhand comments meant in the vernacular, and where they originated? Do you care that Conan Doyle made hundreds, nay, thousands of little, tiny, meaningless mistakes in his novels? This is the annotated collection for you, chum!

This is an excellent annotated and illustrated collection of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes short stories.

Love this book!!!!!!!!

Sure there's the odd weak story here, but the gems more than balance them out. The whole of the canonical short stories. Good notes too. OK, there're cheaper PB editions but this is for the ACD geek. Get the annotated novels too.

The stories and illustrations are great. The annotations, from the universe of "Holmes was real, Watson really wrote the stories, and Conan Doyle..." well, I can't remember what Conan Doyle's supposed role in all this was, but the annotations are twisted.

I'm over 1000 pages in and I'm not even a third of the way through. I'm putting these aside for a bit, they are absolutely wonderful, but I'm beginning to reach my Sherlock limit for the moment.

I haven't read every story in these volumes, but I have read the majority. Of the ones I've read, the majority are extremely clever and engaging. A minority lean toward tedious or boring, but they can be easily overlooked.

Perhaps the most beautifuly laid book in my collection. I love the commentary and the inclusion of original drawings. Superb!

This collection works on the assumption of the reality of Holmes and Watson. “The reader of these volumes will not find reference to the literary sources of the stories or to biographical incidents in the life of Sir Arthur that may be reflected in the canon”. Such details, I think, would be helpful or make sense perhaps of inconsistencies, but work under the assumption of reality, apparently.
Chronology section (in Vol I and III but not II, and I had to return the other volumes while I still had II) is helpful but a little confusing, because it includes expert fan hypotheses which I don't know whether they can be confirmed in Canon, like family members' names and pre-case histories. Annotations include these kind of speculations and reference to the many works trying to explain inconsistencies or connections. But they also include the usual helpful references to things that were of the times, like objects, places, historical people or events. And the inclusion of a variety of story illustrations and pictures of the times and places is great, too.
I don't think you'd want to read this edition for a first read as they reference later stories within earlier ones, plus it's big and bulky. I read most of the stories for the first time via audio.
As the stories go on, perhaps especially from The Return, the annotations seem to poke lots of holes in the “master’s” (meaning Sherlock Holmes) stories, especially it seemed in “The Bruce-Partington Plans” (from The last Bow), and yet in its intro it's said to be “regarded as one of the finest mystery stories in the annals of detection”.
I am perhaps unreasonably annoyed by the editor’s use of the word “role” with a symbol over the “o”. I understand that the word might be from another language which uses symbols over letters, but is it's use in a book published in 2005 a little pretentious? Maybe it's a UK/US difference but I don't believe I’ve ever seen it like that before this trio of books.
And an exchange in French between Arthur Conan Doyle and a French general on the front lines in 1916, shared in a footnote to “His Last Bow”, is not translated. Yet whenever Holmes, in the stories, spouts a line of French or other language, it’s translated.

Short stories Vol.1 finished 6/20. Just reading the annotations (having previously read all the stories) takes some time.
Last volume started 6/27 and finished 7/14.

The rating is for the edition not the stories. There's something gloriously nuts about it. Take a fictional character, pretend he's real, and then argue over ways of sorting out the discrepancies. The stories stand alone, but the annotations are worth the price of entry. And the amount of odd information that gets thrown up would keep the average trivia fanatic happy for months.

This edition of Sherlock Holmes stories and novels is marvellous, and absolutely worth the price (which works out to about $30 per volume). The book is physically gorgeous and lovely to touch, with lots of black and white illustrations and notations in red, and smooth glossy paper. I'm a sucker for that sort of thing. And the cover design is awesome.

What I've seen of the annotations has really impressed me, too. They are partially fannish theories sprouting around narrative discrepancies and plot holes - these evoked fond memories of arguing crazy theories in my HPFGU days just for the fun of it, even when we all knew that the true answer was something along the lines of a mistake - and factual and historical details that provide some context and make the stories that much richer. For instance, I liked the bit where they tried to figure out what sort of snake the Speckled Band was. (Here the answer is, "No real snake, he just made something up.")

(Oh, and it goes without saying that I'd give five stars even to an old crummy be-stained falling apart edition of these stories, but this rating should be read as an emphatic five stars.)