Dear Sir:
We have read your story and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over till next year, we will give you £25 for the copyright.
Yours Faithfully,
Ward, Lock & Co
October 30, 1886
Surely this belongs in the annals of “best £25 ever spent by a publisher.” The author? Arthur Conan Doyle. The manuscript? A Study in Scarlet. Ward, Lock & Co. would print it in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. According to Doyle’s essay, “My First Literary Successes,” the purchase of the copyright meant that the publisher owned not just the magazine rights, but the book rights also. In the essay he remarks:
…and finally they even had the valuable cinema rights for this paltry payment. I never at any time received another penny for it from this firm, so I do not feel that I need to be grateful even if it so chanced that they cleared my path in life.
This quote is from Volume 24 of the signed, limited Crowborough Edition of
Doyle’s complete works. Our set is number 632 of 720 produced. Published in 1930, the last year of Doyle’s life, it is named after the town in East Sussex where he resided with his second wife.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a ship’s surgeon, a Catholic turned Spiritualist, a Freemason, a failed ophthalmologist, an advocate for social and legal justice, and the creator of one of the most beloved and successful mysteries ever written. He conducted seances, believed in fairies, and gave the world a detective described in
A Scandal in Bohemia as “the most reasoning and observing machine the world has ever known.”
As for the £25 paid to Doyle in 1886 for
A Study in Scarlet, a historical currency conversion reveals that amount yielded approximately $4,095 in buying power. Almost enough for Doyle to purchase this set of his collected works.