Shopping a street probably not named after the Borgia orb.

After an unexpectedly potent ferne de coca with lunch yesterday, I found myself in bookstores carrying both old and new tomes along Boulder's Pearl Street -- a moment much more colorful than my average Wednesday. Luckily, that bit of social lubricant didn't loosen up my purse strings or current collecting discipline, though more than a few interesting items were to be had.

The key difference between my buying habits now and those of thirty years ago seems to be a reluctance to add anything to my Sherlock Holmes collection that duplicates things already there. A different cover, a work collecting all sorts of information from books I already own, an extra Annotated for the "give this to someone in the future" closet . . . many of the rationales for vacuuming up Sherlockiana in the past have been well inoculated against. But still, the search goes on.

Somebody's apparently murdered Mary Russell, but I parted ways with that fangirl years ago. And since I strongly suspect her of a "Dying Detective" move like her husband, I don't trust the title. Plus, at this point, I'm still thinking her delusion of stealing Holmes away from Watson has fallen out of fashion.

And the Baring-Gould Annotated is still more likely to turn up in an old book store than the Klinger. I suspect that's because the only way most give up their Annotated is death, and Baring-Gould's buyers are many decades older than Klinger's.

Had the Out of Print t-shirt with the Adventures cover been in my size, I totally might have jumped on that -- it's a beautiful shirt. Although more people probably own the shirt than the particular volume of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes it is based on.

Browsing the magazine racks, wondering if the excellent Boulder Bookstore would go so far as to stock something as niche as The Baker Street Journal, I once again had magazine sticker shock . . . which was an odd reoccurrence, given my last bout was only weeks ago at seeing a special issue of Time offered at ten bucks. A new magazine all about Sherlock Holmes was priced at $19.95, and it seemed like more of a thinner coffee table trade paperback. Very pretty, very glossy, but something sure to get bent and dinged up unless one bagged and boarded it in the store. I tried to find it online to put a link here, but the words "Sherlock Holmes" and "magazine" are not going to do the job on Google.

I'm sure I missed a few things in my shopping -- Sherlock Holmes rarely gets his own section in bookstores (But boy do I love those stores that given him one.) and pastiches filed by author can get missed. The one thing I did miss, just because I forgot to get back to it on my way out of the store, was the Sherlock Holmes temporary tattoos. Of course, those would have been an impulse buy, and the ferne de coca had worn off after wandering all the way down Pearl Street, so the dreaded alcohol/tattoos combo was not a factor.

I left Boulder yesterday with two mysteries, and the one in paper form did not feature Sherlock Holmes. (Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim series has been a favorite, and apparently I had missed one.) The one that did feature our friend Sherlock was why a Benedict Cumberbatch cardboard stand-up was in the middle of a comic book store with a post-it note on his face. There didn't seem to be any comics having to do with Holmes around him, and the post-it was just to put a smile on his face.

I suppose, like me, cardboard Sherlock was just happy to be there.