I love a good mystery. As a little boy, I read Encyclopedia Brown, the Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series, all of Agatha Christie’s works, and Sherlock Holmes. Solving mysteries probably goes a long way to explaining why I love computers.

I recently stumbled across a couple of very old books, gifts from my parents in 1985: Alfred Hitchcock’s Daring Detectives, a collection of eleven “Exciting Stories of Great Feats of Detection” featuring Ellery Queen, Dame Agatha’s Hercule Poirot, Perry Mason, and more; and an anthology of five of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels.

You may be able to tell I read the snot out of these.

I also found 12 issues of Stanford University’s facsimiles of The Strand Magazine featuring Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “consulting detective.”

The Strand Magazine was a monthly publication which was, among other things, the first to publish the Sherlock Holmes stories. It also serialized The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1901. According to Wikipedia,

Readers lined up outside the magazine’s offices, waiting to get the next installment.

Can you imagine doing that in today’s binge culture? Even weekly episode drops bug me now.

Back in 2006/2007, as part of Stanford’s exploration of the Victorian era, they published these facsimiles and sent them monthly—for free—to anyone who requested them. I couldn’t resist.

They published 24 issues, but I foolishly only signed up for the first half. Fortunately, that half included The Hound of the Baskervilles, serialized and made available monthly just as they were to readers in 1901. I loved waiting for, and then devouring each issue.

They’ve long since discontinued publication, but they’ve kept the website up. You can download all the individual issues as PDFs, though it’s not obvious how to get to all of them, so as a public service, below are the direct download links for each issue.

If you’d like to save yourself two dozen clicks, I’ve compiled them all into a single zip file you can download. I also renamed the PDF files for consistency.

Series 1, 2006

Series 2, 2007

Try reading them one per month for the full experience!