

He then identifies all available editions, printings, and issues of both books and gives complete bibliographical descriptions of each. In one sense the unauthorized publication of foreign works was piracy from another view-point it was simply a matter of sharp business practice. Redmond first briefly reviews early copyright law and the Act of 1891. Redmond focuses on Sign but reports similarities in the treatment of Study.

Redmond's purpose in Sherlock Holmes Among the Pirates is to trace the publishing history in America of Study and Sign up to 1930, the date of Doyle's death.

Numerous pirated editions of the two unprotected novels, most of them poorly printed on cheap paper, were brought out by American companies. These two novels were not an immediate success, but the immense popularity of the short stories about Doyle's eccentric detective, published in 1891 in both England and America, rekindled interest in the earlier books. Stevenson was pleased with the decision, and suggested that The Hound of the Baskervilles – which features no Mormons at all – might be "a better introduction to mystery", the Daily Progress said.Because there was no United States copyright law protecting foreign authors of books published before 1891, Arthur Conan Doyle made very little money from American editions of his first two Sherlock Holmes adventures, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of the Four (1890). The ban was protested by more than 20 former students, with one teenager calling it "the best book I have read so far". The Albemarle County school board made its decision after asking a committee to study the novel, which found that it was not "age-appropriate" for sixth graders, who are 11 to 12 years old.
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According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Conan Doyle's daughter said that her father "would be the first to admit that his first Sherlock Holmes novel was full of errors about the Mormons". fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders – women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror". "The man who held out against the Church vanished away, and none knew whither he had gone or what had befallen him," he adds, and when "the supply of adult women was running short. Mormons are "persecutors of the most terrible description", writes Conan Doyle in his novel. Such a marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace." But when Lucy is forced to marry a Mormon, and her father is murdered, Hope sets out to seek revenge. "Nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon. When Lucy, the daughter, falls in love with Jefferson Hope after he rescues her from a herd of cattle, her father is pleased because he is not of the faith. The decision to pull the classic novel from sixth-grade reading lists in Albemarle County, Virginia, was made by the school board, local paper the Daily Progress reports, following a complaint from local parent Brette Stevenson, who said the novel was "our young students' first inaccurate introduction to an American religion".Ī Study in Scarlet includes a lengthy flashback to 19th-century Utah, where a father and his daughter are rescued by Mormons on condition they adopt the Mormon faith. Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been removed from reading lists in Virginia schools after a parent complained about its anti-Mormon sentiments.
