Holmes under the hammer: Rare page sells for £300,000
An extremely rare surviving handwritten page of the original manuscript for Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles has fetched over £300,000 at auction.
The page penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for one of the most famous detective stories sold for US$423,000 (£313,310) in Dallas, Texas.
The manuscript for his 1902 murder mystery featuring the legend of a huge, demonic hound was broken up and 185 pages were offered to dealers as part of an extensive US publicity campaign.
But as Edinburgh-born Doyle wrote the book on highly acidic paper, most have disintegrated and only 37 pages are known to exist today.
The 8in by 13in handwritten page auctioned, which is still in “good condition”, is headed 'Chapter XIII, Fixing The Nets'.
It involves Holmes and Watson discussing a mysterious
murder on Dartmoor and whether to arrest a suspect.
It has a line crossed out where Doyle edited the piece.
In dialogue written on the page, Holmes says: 'My dear Watson, you were born to be a man of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic.
'But supposing for argument's sake that we had him arrested tonight, what on earth the better off should we be for that? We could prove nothing against him. I know where he keeps his hound but what of it?
'There's the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a human agent we could get some evidence, but if we were to drag this great dog to the light of day it would not help us in putting a rope round the neck of its master'.
The novel marked the return of Holmes and Dr Watson after Doyle had killed off his fictional detective eight years earlier.
The whole of Chapter 11 is preserved in the New York Public Library.
A collector sold one of the few remaining pages in private hands at a sale of historic manuscripts by Heritage Auctions, of Dallas, Texas.
Joe Maddalena, executive vice-president at Heritage, added: “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is one of the most beloved and important mystery writers of all time.
“This page is one of just 37 known to exist but most are in libraries, which only increases this leaf 's significance.”