Book review - The Lighter Side of Sherlock Holmes: The Sherlockian Artwork of Norman Schatell (and I guess this pretty well takes care of '"It's Friday and you Deserve it" also.)

If you have followed this blog for any length of time you are aware that I like good illustrative art work. This for me also includes good animation, cartoons and comics, as well as fine art.
If that art work also involves some of my other interests, well, that's even better.
So after reading another bloggers review of

"The Lighter Side of Sherlock Holmes: The Sherlockian Artwork of Norman Schatell" ,

I thought I would check it out.

I have tried to curtail my Sherlockian book buying of late, but every once in a while I still pick one up for a new read. 

This book seemed to be right up my alley.

The title pretty well explains the content and it is pretty well filled cover to cover with fun little cartoons by Norman Schatell.

Here is an example of one of the cartoons.

You can tell Mr. Schatell was a devoted Sherlockian, and his sense of humor was very sharp with much wit. He loved his subject, but not so much that he couldn't see the funny side of it also.

The book is put together mostly by his family with help from friends.

If I were to have any criticisms about the book in would be in the production/publication aspect, not content or art work.

While trying to maintain the original quality of the cartoons they have forfeited clarity of script. I had a little trouble reading some of the gag lines and dialog in the original format.

If they had produced the originals with updated type below the images I think it would have worked better.

It was indeed a treat to see Mr. Schatell's work done by his own hand with dialog and such in his own hand writing, which made it very personal, but, as produced, sometimes hard to read.

I am sure that many of these were done as personal notes to family and friends, so production for publication was never part of the finished plan. That is one of the things that makes this book fun.

It is available in an e-reader format if you wish to enlarge some of the text to make it easier to read.

For content and intent, I give the book;

For production quality I give the book;