The Traveling Books
by Don Hobbs

As a collector of non-English translations of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, I have developed many contacts around the world. One of these contacts lives in Beijing, China. He has been sending me very old Chinese translations, none of which are listed in De Waal. Since I do not read Chinese, I have enlisted help from Yuichi Hirayama, B.S.I., to help with deciphering what I buy. Although he is Japanese, he is still able to read the Chinese characters well enough to give me the bibliographic information I need from my book.

I recently bought a twelve volume set, published in the 1920's. Yuichi was impressed with these book and mentioned them to a friend who is an expert on early Chinese pulp fiction.  His friend, Professor Tarumoto, had never seen this series before and wanted to get more information. Instead of sending a series of emails with attachments, I decided I would just send Yuichi the books. I wrapped them up securely and sent them off to Japan. It is too bad I cannot receive frequent-flyer miles from them. The made their second trans-Pacific journey successfully.

The books arrived at Yuichi's house, in Tokyo, he was able to make complete copies of each book, burn the information onto CD-Rom and sent the information off to Professor Tarumoto. Then he mailed them back to me and they crossed the Pacific Ocean once again. They arrived back this week. Much to my pleasure, the parcel when it left my house contained the twelve book plus another on I sent for Yuichi's further inspection. When I opened the parcel, the thirteen books I sent were there along with a Romanian, two more Chinese , and a very old Spanish translation had joined the group.

The other book I sent was the only known Sherlock Holmes book published in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation. I have deemed this book as a pirated pirate edition. My reasoning is because it has a knock-off cover from an earlier Chinese pirate edition published in 1932 in Shanghai. This book is titled Sherlock Holmes New Mysteries volume 3 and it includes  His Last Bow. What makes it a pirated pirate edition is because it's contents is The Hound of the Baskervilles which is Sherlock Holmes New Mysteries volume 6 of the 1932 Chinese series. It seems that they published the book using the contents of one book and the cover of another.

I am waiting to hear from Yuichi and Professor Tarumoto as the exact contents of the twelve volumes so they can be added to The Galactic Sherlock Holmes so until then....

Happy Collecting!!