The "Iron Curtain" Bootleg

During the Soviet era, Sherlock Holmes books were highly restricted by the government. However, Russian fans loved the detective so much that they created an illegal underground network to translate and distribute the stories. They didn't have printing presses, so fans would manually copy the entire text of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes using carbon paper and typewriters. A popular joke among modern historians is that the Soviet Union managed to ban political dissidents, but they completely failed to stop a Victorian detective in a deerstalker hat.