While there are several large areas of the life Keefauver that I don’t let seep into these little columns -- believe it or not – the one part that does slip in every now and again is my aunt’s antique store. Antiques, be they furnishings, books, or people, are a big part of the Sherlockian life, so it seems a natural digression. This Sunday marked a milestone in my antique life: my final day clerking in my aunt’s store. She finally got the one offer to buy the place that seemed right, and with the end of this year’s Spoon River Drive, we flipped off the light switches and slid the deadbolt on the old front doors one last time.

Was it a sad day? Not really. My aunt is getting to retire a second time, my fellow unpaid laborers are looking forward to actually driving on the Spoon River Drive next year, and me . . . I’ve still got that other antique store that’s been in my life for three decades now, the Canon of Sherlock Holmes.

Calling the Sherlock Holmes stories an antique store might seem a little metaphoric to some, but I mean that phrase in its most literal sense. The Holmes Canon is a storehouse of antiquities that I’ve always loved to wander through. While there are those who relish the stories as crafted literary devices, I have always found as much enjoyment in the details of the thing, pulling bits and pieces from this story and that, flipping to a single page and becoming fascinated with the vision conjured by a single sentence.

The clean collar. Single-stick. A dog-cart.  The basket chair. A steam-launch.

The things we aren’t as familiar with are interesting, but so are the things we still have around . . .

A steel poker. His clay pipe. The butcher’s hog. Lawyers.

Just reading about them in the Canon, you know that they are some really old version of there modern cousins . . . antiques. In fact, that’s a common mistake that I’m sure a lot of us make when reading the sixty stories of Sherlock Holmes: thinking of every object as a dusty relic from an antique store, rather than being a shiny and new version, fresh from the factory. Sitting room recreations of 221B Baker Street always look like they’ve been sitting around since the rooms were vacated in 1903, rather than looking as they did when Holmes lived there. The metal objects are a bit dull with age, the papers a bit faded.

It’s very hard to imagine all the objects of Holmes’s day as they were, and as a result the tales so easily turn into an antique store. But it is a lovely antique store, one has to admit. Every other antique store I’ve ever walked into has always fallen short next to the one held in The Complete Sherlock Holmes. And even if I find a treasure or two, I’m still disappointed in all the things that seem like they were just on the shelves of regular stores: E.T. dolls, Daffy Duck glassware from some Hardee’s promotion, Bantam paperbacks. (If any of those ever showed up in the middle of “Sussex Vampire,” I’d probably have a coronary.)

So today I lost one of the big antique stores in my life. I’ll miss the fun we had behind the counter, being probably the worst employees this side of some wacky sitcom. (And at least once getting repeat business from customers who just came by to hear the banter.) But there’s always the Canon. And the folks that roam those by-ways are pretty wacky as well.

Your humble correspondent,

Brad Keefauver