Talk:The Adventure of the Dancing Men

Isn't this copyrighted?
 * Doesn't appear to be. Any particular reason you ask?--Birgitte SB  14:59, 26 March 2007 (UTC)


 * No, it was first published in 1892, and Conan Doyle died 77 years before you posted your question, and copyright laws around the world generally expire. I see that [the book The_Return_of_Sherlock_Holmes] is tagged accordingly at the bottom, with, which displays the complete worldwide answer including a link to a list of countries' copyright expirations. Mr. Conan Doyle presumably collected many years of royalties for this works, as did generations of his heirs, and now it's time to let the entire world enjoy his legacy freely without the need for further financial inducements for him. Wrong Oms (talk) 21:24, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Image quality
Would it be possible to get some higher quality versions of the Dancing Men images? And also in PNG format.

Dancing man incorrect!
I don't know where this mistake originated, but it is also present in a 1985 (book) edition that I have.

If you compare the encoding for 'NEVER' with the last encoding 'ELSIE PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD' you can see that the 'V' in 'NEVER' is the same character as the 'P' in 'PREPARE'.

(In my book version, the 'R' at the end of 'NEVER' is also incorrect, and looks very similar to the 'B' in 'ABE' in the first encoded message, but fortunately this version has the correct 'R'.)

I've looked at the code in the 80s UK TV version (Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock Holmes) and their version appears to be similar in every respect except that their 'V' has an arm pointing out to the right (so, if the men are assumed to be facing us, it has a left arm). Their 'R' is slightly different in that the raised leg is at 45 degrees to the other leg, rather than 90 as it is in this one and also in my book, but it is consistently so, therefore I don't believe that it makes any difference.

I realise that my point might seem like a foolishly pedantic one! But it was quite annoying for me when reading the story in my book, as I wanted to crack the code myself before reading to the end, and the errors that I came across made this much more difficult. It seems not inconceivable that other readers might want to do the same. For that purpose, this error is admittedly not so hampering as the two in my book, because the 'P' only appears in the final message, and Holmes has already cracked most of the code by then, and arguably therefore so should the reader have done.

This fault does not detract, however, from my appreciation of - and gratitude for - the considerable effort that has been expended to make this story publicly available.

Error seems to be in original manuscript
I noticed this too. Incredibly, it's possible to go back to the source, as handwritten by Conan Doyle, without leaving one's chair: a video taken by an auction house shows the original manuscript; definitely no arm on the "V". They stopped turning the page before getting to the message with the "P", but it definitely shows that the images here accurately reproduced an armless "R". (And this reader did not crack the code until after seeing the final message and Holmes asking out of the blue about "Elriges".) A diegetic explanation would be that Elsie misremembered the code or that Hilton miscopied it or that some chalk had rubbed off. Conan Doyle clearly intended it to be correct: Holmes would have noted any error, and also an error makes it unduly hard for the reader to solve, yet he went out of his way to make it easier by making sure that "E" was the most common letter in this short sample (in his choice of proper names). After 115 years, I think it's high time to correct the mistake so future readers can enjoy an error-free puzzle as intended. Wrong Oms (talk) 20:46, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Second error
It's easy to verify that Holmes's forged reply reads MOME HERE AT ONCE, which would be an outgrabeous error for Holmes to have made. Wrong Oms (talk) 20:46, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Image missing
The last image for this story is missing. This is the image that Holmes suggests Watson should decipher. Decrypted it reads "come here at once". Tweisbach (talk) 13:10, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

=== This seems to have been resolved sometime in the last six years, by the time I saw this work. It now has an image which I see is nearly identical to the Kindle edition I have (with the improvement that a stray horizontal stroke between the legs of the final character is present in the Kindle edition and not here). I commented above that the first character is wrong, and may have been for 115 years. It should begin with the same word as the third message, but it has an extra arm, so that the first and third letters match (MOME).

So should we delete this Talk section?