The modern Sherlockian is caught between two worlds, and my activities this weekend certainly demonstrated that. On Saturday, it was all sorted through dusty old books at my aunt’s antique shop, then on Sunday, it was back to tinkering with the new wiki that I spoke of last week.

Going through piles of old books gathered at countless auctions was like wandered through a huge, unsorted library that was collected by people of every sort of taste. The popular novels of decades gone by, the over-sized textbooks, the odd little booklets from odd little presses . . . you see things that you would never have imagined existed. And you see it in every sort of condition as well.

From books of such quality that they seem to have survived a hundred years of punishment that would have disintegrated other books to well-cared-for tomes done on cheap paper that is actually eating itself with its own acids. Brittle, crumbling paper and cracked, broken leather are constant reminders of the destructive lottery that every book faces in its lifetime. An owner might take fabulous care of it, but who knows what happens when that owner dies. There are tales out there of things like Doyle manuscripts winding up in the dump, tales that would curl your hair!

Some lucky books make it to a library’s vaults, like those of the collections at the University of Minnesota, but most pass from hand to hand, generation to generation until they at last encounter that one person who finds no value to them and throws them out in a damp garage in a cardboard box. Attrition eats away at their numbers.

As a book lover, one has a natural instinct toward the preservation of those endangered species, no matter what  their odd contents. But the basic fact of the matter is, those contents, no matter how well preserved, can only be accessed by their owner, or those travelling to that distant library where they’re housed.

But we live in the beginnings of a new age, an age where data can be accessed from almost anywhere on pages that have no physical substance. There is only one original copy of each page, stored on a server somewhere, but we can have an exact replica of that page moved to our personal computer in an instant. They’re ephemeral . . . and yet, more indestructible than their paper predecessors ever were. I can take the best possible care of any one of those books I sorted through this weekend, yet each is a dead end of sorts. That one copy is it.

Looking over a Sherlockian library of any size, one sees so many carefully written and researched works of which less than three hundred copies exist, and many of which there are less than a hundred. Why? Because that’s the best any of us could do, once upon a time. Books are still an important part of our lives, but consider this: what would a guy like Edgar Smith have done with all of the technology available today? Would he have held himself to paper-and-ink when he could reach so many more Sherlockians and potential Sherlockians on the web? No way.

As I’ve been playing with the new Sherlockian wiki project, I’ve come to realize that web pages don’t take the place of our beloved books. They enhance their reach. An on-line “Sherlockipedia” doesn’t replace our libraries . . . it gives us a tool for finding facts quickly, even passing along the basics to those who would never otherwise have access. Instead of writing and re-writing reference works (have you ever noticed how many Sherlockian reference books are the same thing, just done a tad differently), we can now work together on community reference works that just keep evolving and growing with time.

Elsewhere on the web, the great Sherlockian wiki experiment has begun, and the ground floor has been established to see what we can build on it. Care to join up on what could either be the future of Sherlockiana or “Keefauver's Folly” (eighth in the series, for those of you keeping track).

Let me know here at mailroom@sherlockpeoria.net. The more the merrier.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver