I hope you left room on your bookshelf, because Sherlock Holmes: A study in illustrations Volume 2 is here, bigger, bolder, more bountiful and other words beginning with B. In it’s packed pages, a plentiful plethora of pleasing pictures plus a few Pagets(sorry). An imaginative, intriguing itemized index of iconic illuminated images. In truth it’s quite nice and big and will sit very well next to it’s slightly smaller volume 1 brother, I am hoping for a big family as volume after volume take over your homes and you are forced to move to ever bigger houses.

Answer me this, why do weather people always tell you about yesterday’s weather, you lived through it after all, now in the last volume, we did have a persistent downpour of Paget throughout the book, with intermittent glimpses of Greig and Friston on some pages. This book is a more homogeneous effort, while there are some Paget images, they are more like a drizzle than a Wet Monsoon (there is such a thing as a Dry Monsoon, I never knew that).

We have all the Sherlock Holmes images from 6 International Artists,

Starting with the prolific German Artist, Richard Gutschmidt, both his signed works as well as his unsigned ones making a pleasing total of 228 illustrations and taking the prize as Page Hogger, as Paget did in Volume 1.

Next, we travel across the seas to America, where Graham Grinham drew 6 illustrations for the St. Louis Star, a small number admittedly, but he had a very unique style.

Bridging the Gap between the Americas and Europe, we next have Canadian born George Wylie Hutchinson, who travelled to England as a cabin boy before producing 42 Sherlock Holmes images for the Book versions of A Study in Scarlet.

Staying in England, we have Arthur Twidle and his 17 images.

Then Irish Born, American Artist Thomas Jeffs Nicholl. with his 33 Sherlock Holmes newspaper images (hence the quality).

Finally, we go back to Europe again for French Cartoonist Raymond Pallier and his Hound of the Baskerville 108 image epic work.

If my maths is correct that means there are 434 new images here.