PREFACE This book contains reproductions of the famous Cottingley photographs, and gives the whole of the evidence in connection with them. The diligent reader is in almost as good a position as I am to form a judgment upon the authenticity of the pictures. This narrative is not a special plea for that authenticity, but is simply a collection of facts the inferences from which may be accepted or rejected as the reader may think fit. I would warn the critic, however, not to be led away by the sophistry that because some professional trickster, apt at the game of deception, can produce a somewhat similar effect, therefore the originals were produced in the same way. There are few realities which cannot be imitated, and the ancient argument that because conjurers on their own prepared plates or stages can produce certain results, therefore similar results obtained by untrained people under natural conditions are also false, is surely discounted by the intelligent public. I would add that this whole subject of the objective existence of a subhuman form of life has nothing to do with the larger and far more vital question of spiritualism. I should be sorry if my arguments in favour of the latter should be in any way weakened by my exposition of this very strange episode, which has really no bearing upon the continued existence of the individual. Arthur Conan Doyle. Crowborough, March 1922.
About the Author: Arthur Conan Doyle (born Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle on May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and died July 7, 1930 in Crowborough, Sussex), is a British writer and physician. He owes his fame to his novels and short stories featuring detective Sherlock Holmes - considered a major innovation in the detective novel - and Professor Challenger. This prolific writer has also authored science fiction books, historical novels, plays, poetry and historical works. He was elevated to the rank of Knight of the Order of the Most Venerable Order of St. John by King Edward VII on October 24, 1902. In 1882, he joined forces with his former college fellow, George Bud, in a medical practice in Plymouth. But their relationship proved difficult and Conan Doyle eventually settled independently. Arriving in Portsmouth in June of that same year with less than £ 10 to his name, he opens his practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. At first, the practice was not very successful and, in the meantime, he began to write stories again. His first work of importance was A Study in Red, which appeared in the Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887. This was the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, a character partly inspired by his former university professor Joseph Bell, to whom Conan Doyle writes: "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. Around the core deduction, inference and observation that I have heard you teach, I have tried to build a man. "This similarity does not escape the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who writes to Conan Doyle of the remote Samoa: My compliments to your ingenious and interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes ... Can this be my old friend Joe Bell? Other authors suggest additional influences, such as the famous character Auguste Dupin of Edgar Allan Poe. Living in Southsea, Conan Doyle plays football in an amateur club, the football club of the Portsmouth Association, holding the position of keeper under the pseudonym AC Smith, Conan Doyle is also a good cricketer and, between 1899 and 1907, he played ten first-class matches for the Marylebon Cricket Club. His best score: 43 against London County in 1902