THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

Bringing a Victorian detective into the digital age

Ever since I read Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style I have wanted to typeset a book. If I had my way I would have spent another month on my thesis perfecting the typography and really polishing it. But deadlines are deadlines, so I would have to delve into typography on another project. 

Shortly after I got my Sony Reader I stumbled upon planetebook.com. I was impressed with the design and typography of their eBooks. This inspired me to make my next  typography project typesetting an eBook.

But what eBook? I chose The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle.  When I was around 10 I read the Sherlock Holmes books and have loved them ever since. They are fun, and broken into short independent chapters that make them an easy read. I used the text from Project Gutenberg and after hours of reflowing paragraphs manually, I created typesette.apspot.com, which strips out the duplicate line breaks that Gutenberg texts are filled with. Feel free to use it.

In designing the eBook I wanted to capture some of the mystery of the story so I used a simple black and white image for the cover, a magnifying glass.  The other two Sherlock Holmes books will feature a deerstalker and a pipe.

It is set in Adobe Jensen Pro throughout and saved as a tagged pdf which should be compatible with all Sony Readers and most Kindles. The page size was designed to match the screen size of the Kindle and Sony Reader (I believe they are virtually identical) to prevent odd scaling from occuring. I would be curious to see how it holds up on the Kindle DX or other readers. You can download it here.

The images included in the set start with the .txt version on my reader, progress through the epub version (photos are actually a different Victorian novel) and then end with shots of the finished Adventures. Of course the best way to see it is to download it...

Feel free to send me any comments or suggestions either via twitter or email.