EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 8 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

63 Boot wanted to commission the best quality illustrations and he chose an experienced 28-year-old artist named Walter Paget for the task. However, as the story goes, Boot did not remember Walter’s first name and when he sent the letter offering the job to the Paget household, he addressed it only to “Mr Paget”. Walter’s brother Sidney opened it, assuming that is was meant for him. Ignorant of the mistake, Sidney accepted the commission. As a result he eventually produced 356 black and white illustrations for the Holmes stories, and set his seal on the image of the character. * * * * Sidney Paget, born in 1860, was the son of an official of the Local Government Board in Clerkenwell, himself a man of strong artistic abilities. There were nine children in the family and remarkably three of them became artists. Walter Stanley Paget (1863 – 1935), the youngest, was perhaps the least talented or certainly the least successful. Sidney was the middle sibling with Henry Marriott Paget (1856 – 1936) being the eldest. All achieved a certain amount of fame and commercial success, but it was Sidney who became an artistic celebrity through his work on the Holmes stories, which Courtesy of tThe Arthur Conan Doyle Collection, The Toronto Public Library.