Ninety-seven volumes, all bound in original publisher's blue cloth, blocked in black and gilt. Profusely illustrated throughout by a variety of hands. Generally in very good condition. There are occasionally scratches or marks to the spine or the cloth is a little wrinkled. Some of the earlier volumes have fragile hinges and some of the later volumes have faded spines where the different batches of cloth are more fugitive. Similarly some of the gilts used in the later volumes to the spine are more prone to oxidisation, but generally the volumes are bright and and clean.

An unbroken and exceptionally long run of the pre-eminent short fiction periodical of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Strand Magazine is inextricably linked with the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Having been approached for contributions from the magazine's inception, Doyle later wrote,
"Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if it only engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine … Looking around for my central character, I felt that Sherlock Holmes, who I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories." - Doyle (Memories and Adventures)
The previous full length Sherlock Holmes books had been quietly successful, but it was the monthly short stories in The Strand, voraciously consumed by a readership which quickly reached 500,000, which transported Sherlock Holmes from niche interest to household name. All 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories and the two subsequent Sherlock Holmes novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear, were originally published in The Strand before appearing in book form.
Conan Doyle was not the only notable contributor. Over 100 stories by P.G,Wodehouse including all of the early Jeeves stories appeared in The Strand prior to being collecting in book form. Many Agatha Christie stories also appeared from 1932. H.G.Wells' War of the Worlds was also first serialised in The Strand and the maazine also saw the first appearance of stories and articles by Winston Churchill, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Dorothy Sayers, E. Nesbit, George Simenon, Margery Allingham and Leo Tolstoy.
The magazine was issued monthly and subscribers could have the issued bound up every six months in what became the iconic blue bindings of The Strand. The fashion for binding issues up faded after first war, so bound volumes in the original cloth from the 1920s much scarcer than earlier and the decline in circulation in the 1930s make bound volumes from that period quite rare. Such a compressive collection in such uniformly good condition is very rare indeed.

Stock ID: 40690