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Hi, Toronto Public Library here. 👋 

We preserve these two copies of Sherlock Holmes: Selected Works (1997) as part of our Arthur Conan Doyle Collection. The fore-edge paintings were done by Martin Frost in 2017.

Fore-edge paintings date back centuries and became popular in 17th- and 18th-century England. Often concealed with gilded edges, the hidden images didn’t always relate to the book’s contents. They were applied by hand to fanned pages—sometimes after a book’s creation—for the sake of artistry, ownership or identification.